Oh, I'm not really suffering, LiR - others here, like Paul and Caro, have had/are having a far, far tougher time. My problems are all self-inflicted injury and so I, like Charles V, really deserve no sympathy!

My diagnosis has a splendid name though: megaloblastic anaemia - nothing to do with iron deficiency - just lack of B12. Left unchecked though it can get very nasty and some sufferers end up with Megaloblastic Madness - honestly! Vegans get it a lot and often go quite potty. That explains an awful lot! I think Megaloblastic (or Megalobalistic as my friends are calling it) Madness sounds like a sale in a carpet warehouse - It's Megaloblastic Madness! Everything Must Go!

Anyway, probably explains why I've been so touchy recently.

Minette has disappeared. I think she got married and lived happily ever after, poor Richard quite forsaken.

Temp wrote:

It's Megaloblastic Madness! Everything Must Go!

That cheered me up!

Temperance wrote:

Megaloblastic Madness sounds like a sale in a carpet warehouse - "It's Megaloblastic Madness! Everything Must Go!"

megaloblastic anaemia Hmm. Sounds like a condition resulting from consuming too many pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters if you ask me.

Today I have been at the Malvern Autumn show, and noted these apparently near-identical comestibles offered for sale (at ludicrously inflated prices, let it be said).
Polish style baked pierogi
Traditional Welsh oggies
Artisan Cornish oggys
Cornish pastys
Artisan Devon pasties

Hmm. AIUI the true "traditional" Kernow oggy contained a fair maid, later morphing to the current mix but with jam at one end as a tin miner's snap.

And don't forget the famous Forfar bridie - good minced steak, butter and beef suet. Sometimes onion is included but that's the
thin end of the wedge of vegetarianism so treated with suspicion.

Oh good - ferval's back, too!

First-rate heart attack food that, ferval! Do you Scots ever batter the entire pasty and then deep fry it?

Not to my knowledge, Temp, but since we deep fry pizza and scotch pies, anything is possible.

ferval wrote:

And don't forget the famous Forfar bridie - good minced steak, butter and beef suet. Sometimes onion is included but that's the
thin end of the wedge of vegetarianism so treated with suspicion.

Ferval, seems so delicious: good minced staek, butter and beef suet and onions...all things that I am smart of...water mounts again in the mouth...
But for me it has to be beef and beef suet...such exentric taste, I know...
No chicken or porkey suet and certainly no sheep! in any form...
My wife calls the juice of the meat together with the baked butter: fat. For me it is meat sauce...and I always clean my plate with a piece of bread...not to say that I in the time did as my father...clean it with the tongue...

Kind regards from your friend, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Ferval, seems so delicious: good minced staek, butter and beef suet and onions...all things that I am smart of...water mounts again in the mouth...
But for me it has to be beef and beef suet...such exentric taste, I know...
No chicken or porkey suet and certainly no sheep! in any form...
My wife calls the juice of the meat together with the baked butter: fat. For me it is meat sauce...and I always clean my plate with a piece of bread...not to say that I in the time did as my father...clean it with the tongue...

Kind regards from your friend, Paul.

Not meat sauce, Paul, jus as in all the pretentious best restaurants

Apples - rather a lot this year. Crumbles, pies, baked, stewed, tarts and cooked with raspberries (huge crop this year) cooked so far this season and I am running out of ideas and have still to pick the Brambleys. (The other stuff was made from windfalls and John Greave apples.) Ideas anyone?

Chutney! Rows of jars quietly maturing in the dark, there's an infinity of versions, and apple sauce as well. I make chilli jelly with my crab apples and you could use some of bramleys for that.
As for those raspberries, it's time to immerse some in vodka ready to top up with fizz for Christmas. And any other time.

Apple jelly, or crab apple jelly, can be flavoured with many other herbs too! Principally mint jelly for lamb in the mintless months. A "celebrity" chef (naturally someone I had never heard of) was expatiating on just that subject at Malvern on Saturday.

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Apple jelly, or crab apple jelly, can be flavoured with many other herbs too! .....

Last year I made apple and rose hip jelly ... oodles of flavour, a lovely clear red-amber colour, loads of vitamin C, and it set really easily without needing tons of sugar and/or boiling (I guess because of all the pectin in the apples and hips). It has gone down a treat at breakfast all year amongst my predominantly French clientele, specially for whom, after consulting a French dictionary, I'd carefully labelled the pots as "Gelée de Pommes et Cynorhadon" ... only for quite a few of these native French speakers to then ask me what it was. But I was quite correct, cynorhadon is the correct term for rose hips from the wild rose bush, itself also strictly called une eglatine rather than une rosier sauvage. But anyway, names aside, it has all gone down a treat and I'll be making some more very soon.

Meles meles wrote:

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Apple jelly, or crab apple jelly, can be flavoured with many other herbs too! .....

Last year I made apple and rose hip jelly ... oodles of flavour, a lovely clear red-amber colour, loads of vitamin C, and it set really easily without needing tons of sugar and/or boiling (I guess because of all the pectin in the apples and hips). It has gone down a treat at breakfast all year amongst my predominantly French clientele, specially for whom, after consulting a French dictionary, I'd carefully labelled the pots as "Gelée de Pommes et Cynorhadon" ... only for quite a few of these native French speakers to then ask me what it was. But I was quite correct, cynorhadon is the correct term for rose hips from the wild rose bush, itself also strictly called une eglatine rather than une rosier sauvage. But anyway, names aside, it has all gone down a treat and I'll be making some more very soon.

Meles meles,

 "and rose hip jelly ... oodles of flavour, a lovely clear red-amber colour, loads of vitamin C,"
Now I see what I have at the rose tree in the backgarden. He is some three meter high and I have curbed him to make a pergola, another three meters. And since it's planting, now years ago, no roses or one or three with only some petals and nearly delicate, not to call roses...but perhaps hundreds of those bloody red things that smear my path and are trampled in something disgusting under the feet...
And all my other rose trees have not those rosehips, only some brown dry cores after the rose is gone...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_hip


Thus if I collect them I can...

Kind regards, Paul.

On the subject of using up a glut of apples ... and as a change from all the sweet apple pies, tarts, crumbles, turnovers etc, and providing you’re not vegetarian, how about using apples with meat in a main meal? In Britain apple sauce is the traditional accompaniment to roast pork, but in a lot of regional French cuisine, apples, especially the firmer Bramley types, often serve as a main component of the dish itself, such as pork braised with apples in cider and the whole finally thickened with cream (à la Normande), and sausage or boudin noir with baked and caramellised whole apples (à l'Alsacienne).

Apples also go well with poultry. In the main apple growing regions of England - Kent and Sussex, Devon and Somerset, Hereford and Worcester etc - chicken and ducks used to be left to range freely around the orchards where they served to keep down weeds and eat pests like slugs and snails. The Autumn apple harvest coincided with the time to reduce the size of flocks in preparation for winter – the birds now well fattened up on stubble gleanings from the corn fields and on windfall apples from the orchard. So an old hen who no longer layed regularly, or the rooster past his prime, traditionally ended up in the pot with the seasonal apples, the whole often slow-cooked together in apple cider. This is how my mother used to do chicken sometimes and is basically in the same manner as poulet à la Normande, although she would never have countenanced the use of cream to thicken it. (In 1947 she went to stay with her penfriend in Normandy and her letters home describe how shocked she was at their lavish, and to her eyes very wasteful, use of cream with meat, with potatoes, with vegetables … with everything really. She was of course from a post-war Britain still suffering the trials of rationing, while they lived on a small farm with ready access to their own meat, eggs, butter and crème ... and I think in France rationing had ended quite soon after the war's end). Nevertheless chicken cooked with apples in cider and then with cream stirred in towards the end, is a traditional dish in Devon where there is of course, like Normandy, also no shortage of dairy cows.

Slow braising chicken with apples works best with tasty, but tougher, mature birds and so it might not be the best use of a modern fast-reared young roasting fowl, but it should be good with something a bit more flavourful like turkey or pintade. I've done a modified poulet à la Normande using turkey leg joints as they seemed a closer match to "le vieil coq" that was specified in my French cookbook. And of course the fattier meat of duck and goose has been twinned with the acid sweetness of fruit for centuries. Duck à l’orange wasn’t an invention of TV chefs in the 1970s: it is recorded as making a regular appearance on 16th century Medici dinner tables. Duck goes brilliantly with all sorts of fruit: oranges, plums, apricots, cherries, quinces, pears, and with apples too. Duck legs with fig is a traditional late summer dish around here, and if I’m trying to use up seasonal apples, or eke out the figs, I sometimes combine the two.

For the historically minded there are lots of old recipes (many available online) with interesting combinations of fruit and meat, and in England that often meant apples rather than anything more exotic. If following really old recipes, you might want to reduce the amount of spice that these recipes often suggest, although I'm sure you, P, are well used to highly seasoned exotic mixes of meat, fruits and spices. Nevertheless even when I’ve cooked for conservative French diners, a little nutmeg added to braised chicken and apple, or a tiny pinch of ginger added to duck and figs, has often done wonders.

Anyway just a few ideas as a change from sweet apple desserts.

Or for a vegetarian apple-based 'Dish of the Day' ... how about a savoury, non sweet, potato and apple gratin?

I'll admit I'm just thinking "off the top of my head", as they say, and without actually trying it out but ... how about something akin to a Greek Boureki (which is a mild cheesy gratin of potato and courgette), but with the courgette replaced by sliced apple? ... A 'Gratin des Deux Pommes' ... pommes de terres et pommes des arbres!

The classic French potato gratin, gratin Dauphinoise, is made with emmental or gruyère cheese, while a Greek Boureki is traditionally made with a cheese ... whose name escapes me, but is a mild whey cheese much like Italian ricotta (and ricotta is much easier to find to be honest). I should also add that while garlic is added to both gratin Dauphinoise and Boureki, the latter, quite superbly in my view, also has loads and loads of mint.

So here's the idea: a yummy savoury gratin made from layers of sliced potato and sliced apple, interspersed and lubricated with plenty of ricotta-type cheese, and well flavoured with loads of herbs but especially mint (I'll leave the quantity of garlic to your discretion). The whole then cooked at low heat and very slowly (I'm thinking at least 2 hours at about 160°C - but hey it's your oven you're using) in a deepish dish, to form a crusted sort-of vegetable pie, or tart or, well, a gratin ... to serve with whatever you fancy, or to just to eat, hot or cold, as is.

Such a dish is probably traditional somewhere or other, and has probably been done centuries ago ... but I think the idea sounds interesting, no? And since I currently have loads of potatoes, apples and mint ... I think I'll give it a try.



PS ... Gawd, on reflection I do rather sound like the worst type of TV chef, the one with a new book to promote: all preachy, pretentious, and perfectionist.  Sorry, that wasn't my intention ... I really do apologise.

3 October 52 BC – After a prolonged siege Roman forces finally took the fortress of Alesia; the Gallic leader Vercingetorix surrendering himself directly to Julius Caesar. Alesia's fall proved to be the end of organized resistance to Caesar’s invasion, and marked the beginning of Roman dominance in Gaul, which lasted for the next 500 years.


"Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar", by Lionel-Noel Royer (1899).

The staple food of the Roman soldier at this time was wheat. It was issued to him as grain, ground by him in portable mills and then made by him into bread, panem and hard tack biscuit, buccellatum. Part of Caesar’s skill in defeating the Gauls was in efficiently organising the corn supply. The Romans, at least the common sort who made up the legions, were not generally by choice great eaters of meat, but a legionary was regularly supplied with a small amount of bacon and with fresh mutton of beef when it was available (Roman armies on the march were often accompanied by herds of sheep or cattle). Good generals allowed their troops no wine, but posca (diluted vinegar) was a common drink. The Gauls, or at least their high status warriors, were great eaters of meat, although contrary to what Asterix’s adventures might suggest, wild boar was not usually on the menu. They were more fond of pork and beef from their domesticated herds, served with bread or grain porridge, and washed down with ale or fine imported Italian wine. Gallic nobles loved their fine imported Italian wines, which is perhaps why they eventually knuckled down under Roman control.

Although the usual legionary diet was plentiful it was rather austere, but I would imagine there were extra rations on the night of 3rd October, probably including fresh meat taken from the Gauls’ animal herds. Accordingly the following seems to be a suitable dish of the day. It’s taken from the 4th century Roman cookbook, De Re Coquinaria, written by Apicius, but in its simplicity and use of biscuit (although strictly tractum is a thin, hard, brittle, baked pastry with a long preservation life, rather than true biscuit), it seems to be something that could well have been rustled up in the 1st century BC by group of enterprising Roman soldiers pooling their rations for a celebratory feast.

Porcellum assum tractomelinum - porcellum curatum a gutture exenteras, siccas. teres piperis unciam, mel, vinum, impones ut ferveat, tractam siccatam confringes et partibus caccabo permisces. agitabis surculo lauri viridis, tam diu coques, donec levis fiat et impinguet. hac impensa porcellum imples,surculas, obduras duras charta, in furnum mittes, exornas et inferes.

Roast piglet stuffed with tractum [dry wheat biscuit] and honey - Clean the pig, removing the organs by [means of] the throat. Dry [the pig]. Now grind a little pepper with honey and wine, and put [this mixture] on [the fire] until it boils. Add to this pieces of dry biscuit. Mix with the seasonings in the roasting pan. Stir with a sprig of bay. Let [these ingredients] simmer until it thickens, becoming smooth and rich. Then fill the pig with this stuffing, bind with twigs, cover firmly with papyrus, and roast over the fire. [When the pig is done] remove the paper and twigs and serve. (Apicius VII- 5)

But Caesar and his senior officers probably dined on finer fare, and the following might well be the sort of thing his personal cook produced and served up with a great flourish at the top table:

Porcellum laureatum - porcellum exossas, quasi oenogaratum ornas, praeduras. laurum viridem in medio franges satis, in furno assas, et mittes in mortarium piper, ligusticum, careum, apii semen, laseris radicem, bacas lauri. fricabis, suffundes liquamen, et vino et passo temperabis. adicies in caccabo cum olei modico, ut ferveat. obligas. porcellum lauro eximes et iure ab ossibus tanges et inferes.

Suckling pig crowned with laurel - Bone the piglet and prepare it as you would for wine sauce. Cook [the seasoned piglet in the oven] until half done. Take enough green laurel, break it in half, and decorate the animal. [Finish] roasting in the oven. [For the sauce] bruise in a mortar, pepper, lovage, caraway, celery seed, laser root, and laurel berries. Moisten with stock and blend with wine and wine syrup. Heat in a pan with a little olive oil. Boil and thicken [with bread or biscuit crumb]. Coat [the pig] with sauce. Remove the laurel wreath [before carving] and serve. (Apicius VII-9)

For Caesar, Alesia was an enormous personal success, both militarily and politically. The senate declared 20 days of thanksgiving for this victory but refused Caesar the honour of celebrating a triumphal parade, the peak of any general's career. Political tension increased and two years later, in 49 BC, Caesar crossed the Rubicon, which precipitated the Roman Civil War of 49–45 BC. It was thus several years after Alesia before he finally got his triumph.

I can’t find any descriptions of what was eaten at Caesar’s triumphal banquent in 45 BC, but there is this comment made by Pliny the Elder:

"The first to develop a special piscine [fish pond] for the moray was Gaius Hirrius, who supplied six thousand morays for Caesar’s triumphal banquets. He gave them for free. He didn’t want money or anything else in return. This was the beginning of our love for this unique fish. In Baculo [near Baia], the orator Hortensius had a pond containing a moray which he loved so much that he is said to have wept when the animal passed away. On the same farm, Antonia, the wife of Drusus, [and mother of the emperor Claudius] decorated her favourite moray with earrings. The creature was so famous that many people flocked to Baculo just to see it". (Pliny, Naturis Historia IX-81)

So finally, as a change from all the roast pork, here's a recipe for moray eel:

Ius in murena assa - ligusticum, satureiam, crocomagna, cepam, pruna damascene enucleate, vinum, mulsum, acetum, liquamen, defritum, oleum, et coques.

Sauce for roast moray - [Mix] pepper, lovage, savoury, saffron, onion, pitted Damascus prunes, mulsum [honeyed wine], liquamen [fermented fish sauce], defrutum [syrup made from reducing grape must], oil. And then cook. (Apicius II-2)

Moray eel, with or without earrings, is probably rather hard to come by these days, but the recipe should work equally well with steaks of conger eel or even cod.

Salve!

Boars aside, I still prefer the Asterix depiction of the event ....



And unlike Royer & Co, in Asterix we also get a depiction of the immediate next step (hop?) in Caesar's career ...

11 October 1919 – a whole new chapter in the history of food, catering and dining opened when the first in-flight meals were served on a scheduled airline flight. On this day Handley-Page Transport Ltd. launched an innovative lunchbox service on its daily flight between London and Paris.

Throughout the previous decade and especially during WW1, aircraft design had advanced rapidly from small, canvas-and-piano-wire planes, barely capable of getting a couple of persons aloft, to long-range bomber aircraft capable of flying all the way from Britain to Germany and back - or visa versa - having dropped a couple of tons of bombs en route. But with peace, attention soon turned to the potential for civilian aviation and in Britain things advanced rapidly.

London's first commercial airport, Hounslow Heath, (located not far from the modern Heathrow Airport, but long-since submerged by housing), was completed and opened for business on 1 July 1919. (Although one should note that it wasn't Britain’s first commercial/civilian airport. The first purpose-built commercial airport in Britain, and indeed in the world, was constructed at Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex, which was licensed for civilian air traffic, and duly started operation, in 1910 ... and it's still in operation today). But anyway, on 2 September 1919 Handley-Page Transport Ltd (an offshoot of the aircraft manufacturer) began the first regular international scheduled passenger airline service, when it began flying daily from Hounslow airfield to Le Bourget in Paris, and back, using Handley-Page Type O/400 bombers which they had modified into 10-seat airliners. The route was an immediate success and on 11 October 1919 the airline launched the first in-flight food service when passengers were offered a lunch-box on their two-and-a-half hour flight from London to Paris.




Above: A Handley-Page O/400 bomber converted to an airliner by the addition of wicker seats and some windows cut in the sides. The cabin is constricted by internal struts as it was originally designed to hold bombs rather than passengers. But I like the homely touches: the chintzy curtains, the vases of flowers, and the clock perched on the shelf, ready to fall onto someone's head during take-off ... and while we're about it I'm not even sure the chairs are fixed to the floor!

These first in-flight meals were simply pre-packed lunch boxes, containing sandwiches, biscuits and fruit, with coffee served from a thermos flask. Passengers had to pre-order and paid 3 shillings for one of the boxes (equivalent to about ₤5 today – so not excessive) and anyway this would have been a trivial amount to anyone able to afford the ₤21 fare for the return ticket at a time when a good craftsman could earn perhaps only ₤1 or at best £2 a day.

Nowadays, on all but the longest flights there is often no meal offered at all, or at best there is just a couple of sandwiches in a box with a bag of salted nuts. So today we are very much back with the same level of service as was first offered in 1919. But somewhere between these two lunchbox eras there were a wonderful few decades of fine dining in the air.

On the 31 March 1924  Handley-Page Transport merged with three other airlines to form Imperial Airways, initially serving mainly European destinations but rapidly extending to cover the British Empire routes to South Africa, India and the Far East including Malaya and Hong Kong, and thence with partnership companies; Qantas (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd) and TEAL (Tasman Empire Airways Ltd) to Australia and New Zealand. But initially the most prestigious route remained the daily service between London and Paris. In 1927 with the introduction of newer and bigger aircraft on this route (the Armstrong-Whitworth Argosy) the daily London-Paris flight was christened the ‘Silver Wings’ service. The Argosy had been designed as a 20 seat aircraft but for the London-Paris route (now departing from the new Croydon airport) two seats were removed to make space for a small bar and food preparation area.


An Imperial Airways Armstrong-Whitworth Argosy circa 1928.


The Argosy's cabin with the steward and his tiny bar tucked away at the back.

A plane flying to Paris with about twenty passengers would typically carry a couple of chickens, four pounds of beef, three pounds each of ham and tongue, several loaves, fruit, salad, cheese and biscuits. There were also thermos containers for tea, coffee, hot milk and bovril. But the drinks service was limited to whisky, with or without soda, bottled beer and mineral water. Salads and sandwiches were made to order and drinks prepared all from the tiny cubby-hole behind the last row of seats.

There were two stewards and the responsibility for the comfort and enjoyment of passengers on the 'Silver Wings' flights from Croydon to Paris rested squarely on their shoulders. Dressed in their blue trousers, white jackets and peaked caps, they were supposed to represent the efficient and smart face of Imperial Airways. The rule book described their job as requiring good manners, tact, a sense of humour, unlimited patience and above all, imagination, ‘which is the power of anticipating passengers’ wants and supplying them before they are expressed’. Their appearance was expected to be immaculate and as the rule book sternly observed, ‘a wilting collar will do much to take the crispness out of a salad’.

Having welcomed the passengers on board and shown them to their seats, they were expected to start to take orders for food and drink as the plane taxied along the runway. There were no rules about being seated for landing and take-off for the staff. As well as food and drinks they had to supply passengers with stationery, maps and magazines whenever they were summoned by service bells, as well as 'point out places of interest while en-route'. And it was also expected that they would have washed up (using the very limited supply of running water available) before the plane landed.

After some experimentation in the early thirties, Imperial Airways devised a system for hot food to be packed in airtight aluminium containers lined with straw and asbestos. These slotted into drawers specially constructed for the purpose on the aircraft, thus finally allowing hot, or at least warm, meals to be served.


The steward's galley circa 1935 ... but I'm not sure of the aircraft type nor route. I suspect it might be on an Armstrong-Whitworth Atlanta, which had a very advanced more spacious design when first introduced in the mid '30s ... but I'm really not sure.


The 'Silver Wings' service on the London to Paris flight, circa 1930 ... probably on a Handley-Page 42.

London-Paris remained the premier service route, with catering made all the easier since the flight time was only a couple of hours and fresh and hot food supplies could readily be obtained in both departure cities. Catering became more problematic as flights became longer and the routes extended into Africa, and across the Middle East to India, and beyond.

On these long-haul flights there was still little provision to prepare hot food. In the Handley-Page 42 aircraft (introduced in 1928) the steward had a tiny galley tucked under the wing behind the cocktail bar … clearly it was much easier to serve vodka martinis or gin-and-tonics, rather than full meals. Accordingly most long international flights, rather than serve an in-flight meal, landed and disembarked the passengers at meal times. The aircraft didn’t usually fly at night and while the trip to India still took seven days, passengers always stayed overnight in hotels. Indeed Imperial Airways made a feature of this, expounding the exotic nature of the flight by means of passenger information cards that not only gave the time of departure but also described the itinerary: “Luncheon in Cairo, Tea in Alexandria, Dinner in Khartoum”.


An Imperial Airways HP.42 at Entebbe, Uganda circa 1936.


And here's the service aboard a HP.42 heading to Khartoum. Note that the dapper gentleman on the left has a pith helmet in the luggage rack - the proper attire for any well-prepared traveller in Africa.

At the end of 1934 the British Government decided to implement an air service that would deliver mail to every country in the Commonwealth at a standard rate. Flying boats were the ideal transport as they could carry much larger freight loads than the land-based aircraft of the time. They were also able to alight and take off from any reasonably large body of calm water, so were capable of making the frequent stops that flying long distances and delivering mail, required. Imperial Airways commissioned Short Brothers to build a large, long-range flying boat, known as the ‘Short Empire’.



As well as mail, Empire flying boats could carry up to 14 passengers and with a flight time of only ten days from Australia to Southampton compared to more than 40 days by sea, they were a serious rival to ships, although only for the better off. Flying boats provided a first-class only service and the prices, at the equivalent of about £10,000 for a flight from London to Australia, were far beyond the reach of most people. Travellers in the 1930s were used to the comforts of a large ship and Short Brothers, who built the Empires, deliberately claimed ‘We don’t build aircraft that float, we build ships that fly’. Empire flying boats contained a promenade cabin, galley, bar and plenty of space to stroll about and socialise. The Empires however still had only limited cooking facilities on board: there was an electric water heater to make tea and warm a few things up, but not much else. However, at least initially, the flying boats did not generally operate during the night, so the voyage from Australia to England still required nine overnight stops with passengers staying at luxury hotels, such as Raffles in Singapore. Later services did fly during the night, but then passengers had beds in private cabins, and were served breakfast in bed with tea, toast, marmalade, boiled eggs (on demand) and fresh orange juice (then a novelty).


Breakfast in bed in a cabin onboard a Short Empire.

The Empires cruised at just 150 miles per hour and usually at no higher than 5000 feet and had wide windows so passengers could take in the view as the landscape and oceans below passed serenely by … while supping fresh oysters and sipping a glass of champagne. Now that’s the way to fly!


The bar on a Qantas Short Empire flying boat.

But with outbreak of war in 1939 all these services came to an end. And so that seems to be a suitable point to conclude this tale … at least for now.

But what to serve for today’s dish-of-the-day? Sandwiches and bovril might be apt but I propose, in keeping with the adventurous spirit of aviation in the inter-war years, a slice of 'Amy Johnson Cake', named of course after the daring 1930s aviator.

This recipe first appeared in the South Australia Country Women’s Association ‘Calender of Cakes’ recipe book, 6th edition (1957):

Amy Johnson Cake -Rub 2oz butter into 1 large cup SR [self-raising flour], sifted with a pinch of salt:  mix to firm dough with a little milk. Roll out ¼ inch thick and line a greased cake tin. Spread with raspberry jam and sprinkle with currants. Then make a sponge mixture: beat 2 eggs and ¾ cup of sugar until light and fluffy. Fold in 1 cup sifted SR flour and finally 2 tablespoons butter melted in 3 tablespoons of milk. Pour on top of pastry. Bake about 40 minutes in moderate oven. When cold, ice with thin lemon icing and sprinkle with coconut.

Thank you very much for this new splendid dish of the day, Meles meles.

I read it from a to z.  It was all even interesting...at least to me ...

Kind regards and with esteem from Paul.

The "Empire" flying boats were effectively converted into Short Sunderlands for the war - but one of their landing places, Habbaniyeh Lake, featured prominently in the suppression of the Raschid Ali "revolt".
The writing is on the sky for BA passengers - under 2 hour flights the hoi polloi will no longer be served food - they will have to buy M&S sarnies.

Footnote - Last night we had lamb leg steaks, which I dressed with redcurrant jelly on one side and mint jelly on the other. Served with home-grown (definitely NOT khaki) sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli (someone forgot to inform our plants they shouldn't be attempting to flower this early), and new potatoes. Only the meat was not from our own sources.

Today the girl Siduri has been making sweet mustard pickle - shallots, green tomatoes (from one of the hanging basket types), green beans (mix of scarlet runners and borlottis - about the end of our crop), and courgettes. Should have been marrow type pickle, but the local greengrocer bought up the last of mu full-size marrows).

Tonight we had spiced smoked mackerel with scrambled eggs - the small ones our pullets have started producing.

Mention of Amy Johnson reminds me that it is the 80th anniversary of Jean Batten's solo flight from England to New Zealand, the first time that had been done.  There is to be a film of this screening on NZTV on Sunday 23rd October.  Jean was driven by her desire to fly and she, aided by her mother, used whatever means they could to further her ambition, including using enamoured young men's money and then discarding them. Her later life seemed a bit lonely and she never married. Her mother died about 15 years before she did, and she died in France after refusing treatment for a dog bite.

I was brought up on a diet of these women pilots, Jean, Amy and Amelia Earhart, as they were my father's heroines.  (My father was very fond of the female sex, not so much in a romantic or sexual sense, (though he may have had unfulfilled fantasies about that) but just preferring their company to men's, and indulging my taste for judging the attractiveness of film stars and celebrities.)

13 October 54 AD – The Roman Emperor Claudius died in mysterious circumstances: he’d fallen ill shortly after dining the previous evening and died a few hours later, early in morning of the 13th. Although some ancient writers thought he’d died of natural causes (Claudius was 63 years old) most claim he’d been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, to make way for her son, Nero. The poison was supposed to have been administered in some mushrooms and in particular a dish of what are now called Caesar’s mushroom (Amanita caesarea).


The Emperor Claudius.

While the Celts and Germans tended to attribute dark, magical powers to mushrooms, the Romans regarded the edible varieties simply as delicacies, and from frescos and mosaics in Pompeii it is clear that they were familiar with all the common edible varieties: field mushrooms, ceps, chanterelles, morels, truffles etc. So blasé were they that they generally attributed cases of mushroom poisoning to the simple carelessness or stupidity of ignorant kitchen slaves  … or to deliberate treachery.

"Among those foods which are eaten thoughtlessly, I would justly place mushrooms. Although the flavour is excellent, mushrooms have fallen into disgrace by a shocking instance of murder: they were the means by which the Emperor Tiberius Claudius was poisoned by his wife Agrippina: and so by doing this she gave  to the world and to herself another poison, one worse than all the others: her own son, Nero."

Nero himself once made a witty observation about Claudius and mushrooms:
"At a banquet a dish of mushrooms was brought in. Someone commented that mushrooms were the food of the gods, whereupon Nero added: ‘That’s right. It was from eating a mushroom that my [step]father became a god’."

The Caesar mushroom gained its English name by association with Claudius’ death, and this is repeated in the French name ‘impériale’, the German, ‘Kaiserling’, the Spanish ‘huevo del Rey’ and the Polish ‘Cesarski’. The Italians on the other hand call it ‘ovolo’ because when it is very small it looks like a hen’s egg in size and colour. Even in the Mediterranean region the mushroom is fairly rare (they occur mostly in the hills of northern Italy) and as they are both rare and quite delicious they are very expensive.


Caesar's mushrooms - you can see why they are also known as 'eggs'.

Caesar’s mushroom (Amanita caesarea) is in the the same family (strictly it's in the same genus so actually very closely related), as the death cap (Amanita phalloides), the destroying angel (Amanita virosa) and fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), all of which are very poisonous. Fortunately identification of Caesar’s mushroom is fairly straight forward but nevertheless every year there are cases of mushroom poisoning, most usually from eating death caps. (In France you can always take your mushroom finds to a pharmacist as mushroom identification is part of their training). Although Caesar's mushrooms are readily identifiable when mature, there is a risk with individual small specimens as all the Amanita species start out in the same egg-like manner. It is therefore entirely plausible that some death cap mushrooms had been put into Caesar's supper, whether by accident or design. When chopped up and well mixed in with the other mushrooms (the death cap doesn't have a particularly distinctive nor disagreeable taste) they would have been indistinguishable and a single one would be sufficient to kill.

Should you ever be fortunate to get hold of some Caesar’s mushrooms, because of their delicacy I suggest you eat the smallest, tenderest ones raw, simply dressed with olive oil and lemon juice. (NB many 'edible' mushrooms must still be cooked if they are not to cause gastric upset, although Caesar’s mushrooms, like field mushrooms and common ceps, are perfectly safe to eat raw). Larger Caesar’s mushrooms have a more robust flavour and tend to be firmer, so they are perhaps better cooked, maybe brushed with olive oil and grilled, or lightly fried in butter. 

But I’ve never seen Caesar’s mushrooms in the wild, nor for sale, so you’ll probably have to make do with some other type of mushroom for today’s dish of the day, such as some common ceps (Boletus edulis), also known as penny-buns, or porcini, and which happily are just in season at the moment (I found some yesterday while walking the dog). I had mine last night, thinly sliced, sautéed in butter, then with just a little chopped parsely made into a delicious omelette aux ceps, but if you can’t find any fresh ones it’s equally good made with rehydrated dried ceps.

We don't make much use of "wild" fungi in the UK. I like ink caps - but beware! If you eat common ink caps, don't consume alcohol with them (indeed, up to 3 days after eating them it can still cause problems). Shaggy ink caps / lawyers wig are equally tasty, and don't require one to "sign the pledge". In the days when the girl Siduri's father was a farmer, we used to go mushrooming and blackberrying in his fields. Although we still could (the landowner or tenant does not own "wild" foods like these), the best areas are not grazed as they were, and you can't see any mushrooms which have survived the change. Of course, it's too late to gather blackberries, the Devil has cast his cloak over them on Oct 1st (some say Sept 30th).

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

The "Empire" flying boats were effectively converted into Short Sunderlands for the war - but one of their landing places, Habbaniyeh Lake, featured prominently in the suppression of the Raschid Ali "revolt".
The writing is on the sky for BA passengers - under 2 hour flights the hoi polloi will no longer be served food - they will have to buy M&S sarnies.

The flying boats also took part in the Berlin airlift - landing on the Wannsee.

Gilgamesh,

"Footnote - Last night we had lamb leg steaks, which I dressed with redcurrant jelly on one side and mint jelly on the other. Served with home-grown (definitely NOT khaki) sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli (someone forgot to inform our plants they shouldn't be attempting to flower this early), and new potatoes. Only the meat was not from our own sources.
Today the girl Siduri has been making sweet mustard pickle - shallots, green tomatoes (from one of the hanging basket types), green beans (mix of scarlet runners and borlottis - about the end of our crop), and courgettes. Should have been marrow type pickle, but the local greengrocer bought up the last of mu full-size marrows).
Tonight we had spiced smoked mackerel with scrambled eggs - the small ones our pullets have started producing."

You have such a "plastic" (in my Dutch dictionary they translate the Dutch word "plastisch" by "expressive". In my English dictionary they say for the English word "plastic":slang: superficially attractive?)
And I learned moreover tonight the meaning of "pullets"...

Your friend Paul.

14 October 1066 – The Battle of Hastings.

There is little need here to dwell on the history of the event, so without more ado, for a commemorative dinner, I propose the following menu:











Bayeux Tapestry - Cooks making pottage, grilling steaks and cooking spit-roasted kebabs.[/left]











Turner - The Fish Market at Hastings Beach (1810).



 

Excellent, really excellent post, MM.

I do think you and nordmann should get together and work on a book. I could imagine your recipe(s) for each day, plus  lovely colour photos of the various dishes (which you, of course, would prepare and present). You could also suggest suitable wines for every meal. Nord could perhaps add one of his witty commentaries on the history and/or the people for each day. I think that between you you would come up with something people would really enjoy and would buy.

Think of the money you could make - and you could both end up on the tele doing a series for Channel 4.

Temperance wrote:

you could both end up on the tele doing a series for Channel 4.

Don't wish that dreadful fate upon them!

Nearly missed this one as a nice little follow up to the first in-flight meals being introduced on 11 October 1919 ...


15 October 1928 - the first commercial passenger transatlantic flight arrived in the US, when the airship Graf Zeppelin (D-LZ127) landed at NAS Lakeshurst, New Jersey, at 5:38 PM. She’d departed Friedrichshafen, Germany, four days earlier at 07:54 on 11 October 1928, and had travelled the 9,926 km non-stop.

In addition to the 36 officers and crew, and 24 passengers, there was also a stowaway on the fight, 19-year old Clarence Tehune, who had secreted himself onboard the Graf Zeppelin at Friedrichshafen and worked his passage in the airship's kitchen. Terhune was returned to Europe on the French liner SS Ile de France along with a number of airship crew members. This was the first scheduled crossing of the Atlantic on a regular service for fare-paying passengers - it was not the first actual crossing. The British military airship R34 had achieved that in 1919, followed shortly after by Alcock and Brown’s crossing in an aeroplane, and in 1928 the Graf Zeppelin’s captain had already crossed once before in 1924 when he'd delivered the German-built airship USS Los Angeles to the US Navy.


Graf Zeppelin visits Hanworth airfield in 1932, her huge size dwarfing all the other aircraft in the foreground.

Airships by their very nature were designed for long sustained flight and so food catering for passengers and crew was essential. Moreover while there were the same weight limitations as for heavier-than-air craft, there were not the same restrictions on space. Airships could therefore carry more spacious facilities for preparing food and for eating it. So while the passengers on the London to Paris flights in 1919 contemplated their sandwiches and thermos of coffee, the crew on the R-34 just a few months earlier had been provided with regular hot meals cooked on-board.

But if the accommodation and facilities on military airships were rather austere and functional, for the fare-paying passengers on the Graf Zeppelin, they were much more luxurious.

The flight deck and operational spaces, common areas, passenger cabins, and public toilet facilities on the Graf Zeppelin were all contained in a single contiguous "gondola" structure built into the forward third of the airship's ventral surface. The forward operational spaces consisted of the flight deck, a map/navigation room with two large open access hatches to allow the command crew to communicate with the navigators, radio room, galley, and a short passage to the main entrance-exit door space. An ascending ladder located in the map room allowed access to a keel corridor inside the hull. The map room also had two large windows, one on each side, which permitted navigators to shoot the horizon and sky with a sextant.



Behind the operational spaces were the main dining and sitting room with four large windows which connected via a long corridor to ten passenger cabins capable of sleeping 24, a pair of washrooms, and dual toilet facilities.  Each passenger cabin was designed in the "Pullman" style as enjoyed on luxury train travel. By day each was set with a sofa which by night converted to two beds, one above the other. The crew's quarters were located inside the hull and were reached by a catwalk. The galley was equipped with a single electric oven with two compartments, and hot plates on top for cooking. However one luxury that was not provided on the Graf Zeppelin was heating.

Passenger cabins - in day mode (L) and night mode (R):



And the dining salon:





A typical dinner menu served aboard a Graf Zeppelin flight was:

Cream Soup Hamilton
Grilled Sole with Parsley Butter
Venison Cutlets Beauval with Berny Potatoes, Mushrooms and Cream Sauce
Mixed Cheese Plate

... and of course it was different every evening.Naturally a selection of fine German wine accompanied the meals: the Mülheim Riesling was so popular it became known as Zeppelinwein.
 
The Graf Zeppelin's operational career spanned almost nine years from first flight in September 1928 until its last in June 1937. After making six domestic flights in Germany, the airship made a first long distance journey in October 1928 crossing the Atlantic to the United States. Later demonstration flights included a round-the-world tour in August 1929, a Europe-Pan American flight in 1930, a polar expedition in 1931, two round trips to the Middle East, and a variety of other flights around Europe. In 1932, however, the Graf Zeppelin began five years of providing regularly scheduled passenger, mail and freight service between Germany and Brazil. The fare for the trip from Germany to Brazil in 1934 cost 1,500 Reichsmarks (about £9000 at today’s rates) but fees from high value freight and air mail provided much if not most of the income needed to support the airship's commercial operations These operations were the airship's principal function until it was abruptly withdrawn from active service on the day after the loss of the Hindenburg in May 1937, after having made a total of 64 round trips to Brazil.

During the airship's operational career, the Graf Zeppelin flew more than 1.7 million km (1,056,000 miles), becoming the first aircraft in history to fly over a million miles, made 590 flights, 144 oceanic crossings (143 across the Atlantic, one across the Pacific), carried 13,110 passengers, and spent 17,177 hours aloft (the equivalent of 717 days, or nearly two years), all of which was accomplished without ever injuring a passenger or crewman.

Given the splendid service provided on-board the Graf Zeppelin compared to that provided by other airlines using aeroplanes, it seems rather down-to-earth to suggest a humble sandwich. Nevertheless today’s dish is ‘the Zeppelin’, which was in turn a derivative of the long 'submarine sandwich'. The Zeppelin, or Zep, seems to have been so-named after either the Graf Zeppelin, or the Hindenburg, made one of their well-publicised visits to the US (although in all its years of travel the Graf Zeppelin itself only landed in the US four times).

From 'Tap & Tavern' Magazine (US) 25 January 1960:
"ZEP SANDWICH CHAMP – Here’s another of the of the 20 Best Sandwiches of 1959, elected by the School of Hotel Administration, Cornell University, in a contest sponsored in the food service industry by Wheat Flour Institute and the National Restaurant Association."

ZEP SANDWICH ON BUN 
(makes 4 sandwiches) 
4 Italian-style hearth baked buns
4 thin slices Provolone cheese 
8 thin slices salami 
4 large tomato slices 
Salad oil 
Crushed oregano 
Dash salt 
Crushed cherry peppers (optional) 

Split buns. Place cheese on bottom half. Add 2 slices salami, then onion slice and tomato slice. Sprinkle with salad oil, oregano and salt. Add a teaspoon of crushed hot peppers, if desired. Cover with bun tops



Hmmm ... on second thought's I'll stick with the food on the Graf Zeppelin.

Thanks Meles meles for this supplement...
I saw an interesting documentary on ARTE about the flight around the world of the Zeppelin. It was patronized by Hearst in 1929. And it was one of his secretaries, who did the report and she actually the first woman to fly around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_127_Graf_Zeppelin
From the wiki:

At the behest of American newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose media empire was the major commercial backer of the project with four staffers among the flight's nine passengers, the Graf's "Round-the-World" (Weltrundfahrt 1929) flight in August 1929 officially began and ended at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey.^[39] As with many of the airship's other flights, however, its expenses were also heavily offset by the carriage of souvenir mail to and/or from Lakehurst, Friedrichshafen, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. A U.S. franked letter flown on the whole trip from Lakehurst to Lakehurst, for instance, required US$3.55 in postage or the equivalent of roughly $45 in current dollars if based on the CPI.^{[N 4]} The $200,000^[39] Hearst paid for exclusive media rights would currently be the equivalent of $2.5 million if figured on the same basis.


Route of Graf Zeppelin's round-the-world flight
Built in Friedrichshafen, Germany (
 WikiMiniAtlas
47°39′14″N 9°28′44″E / 47.654°N 9.479°E / 47.654; 9.479 (1. Friedrichshafen (construction)))
Started at Lakehurst NAS, USA (
 WikiMiniAtlas
40°01′59″N 74°21′13″W / 40.033°N 74.3536°W / 40.033; -74.3536 (2. Lakehurst NAS (start of trip)))
Eastward to Germany (
 WikiMiniAtlas
47°39′14″N 9°28′44″E / 47.654°N 9.479°E / 47.654; 9.479 (3. Friedrichshafen refueling))
Eastward to Kasumigaura Naval Air Base, Japan (
 WikiMiniAtlas
36°03′00″N 140°13′01″E / 36.05°N 140.217°E / 36.05; 140.217 (4. Kasumigaura Naval Air Base))
Eastward to Los Angeles (
 WikiMiniAtlas
33°56′33″N 118°24′29″W / 33.9425°N 118.408°W / 33.9425; -118.408 (5. Los Angeles (Mines Field))), then back to Lakehurst (
 WikiMiniAtlas
40°01′59″N 74°21′13″W / 40.033°N 74.3536°W / 40.033; -74.3536 (6. Lakehurst NAS (end of trip))).
Returned to Germany (
 WikiMiniAtlas
47°39′14″N 9°28′44″E / 47.654°N 9.479°E / 47.654; 9.479 (7. Friedrichshafen second and final landing))
As with the October 1928 flight to New York, Hearst correspondent Lady Grace Drummond-Hay was on board making her the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air. Also representing Hearst among the passenger complement were correspondents Karl von Wiegand and Australian Arctic explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, and photographer/newsreel cameraman Robert Hartmann. The US Government was represented by Naval airshipmen LCDR Charles Rosendahl and LT Jack C. Richardson who flew as official observers.^[39][41] A semi-documentary film entitled "Farewell" was released in 2009 which featured much of the newsreel footage of Lady Drummond-Hay shot by Hartmann during the flight. The film was later aired on the BBC under the title "Around The World by Zeppelin".^[42]"


And I was so lucky to find this film, the same as the one I saw on ARTE.




Kind regards, Paul.

PS:

Now I see that it is a Dutch film. Well made in my opinion....

PPS:

We seem to speak last days about women only....

Paul.

Nearly missed this one ...

25 October 1400 - Geoffrey Chaucer died on this day with his Canterbury Tales still unfinished.

Amongst the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury there was of course a cook:



A Cook they hadde with hem for the nones
To boille the chiknes with the marybones,
And poudre-marchant tart, and galyngale.
Wel koude he knowe a draughte of London ale.
He koude rooste, and sethe, and broille, and frye,
Maken mortreux, and wel bake a pye.
But greet harm was it, as it thoughte me,
That on his shyne a mormal hadde he.
For blankmanger, that made he with the beste.
 
In other words, the Cook is skilled at roasting, boiling and frying, he can make pies and stews and many other dishes, he knows how to use spices, and can determine the quality of ale. Unfortunately he also has a weeping sore on his shin and he has the habit (mentioned later in the story) of repeatedly re-heating his pies, after he has drained off the gravy so that he can re-use it, and his shop is full of flies, which may make up some of the 'parsley' in his stuffed goose.

Notes to the above text:
Marybones - marrow-bones, for many centuries prized for their rich, unctuous, fatty, contents that were added to sweet and savoury dishes alike.
Poudre-marchant – literally ‘merchant’s powder’,  which was clearly some sort of ready-prepared spice mix (in the same manner as say, garum masala, or five-spice powder) … but unfortunately so commonly-known that no-one bothered to record its exact composition.
Galyngale – is a spice made from the rhizomes of a plant related to ginger, which it very closely resembles, both in form and taste. While English cooks may have made use of a native plant in the same family, Cyperus longus, sometimes known as 'English galingale', the 16th century herbalist Gerard reported that in his day the kind "commonly in shops called Galingale" was "true galingale … from China".
Morteux (or Mortrews) - a sort of cooked-meat paste which was ground up in a mortar (hence the name) and was usually made so thick "that it be standing" – in other words, it was similar to a meat paté.
 
…. and then there’s the cook’s best dish: 'blancmanger'.
 
Blancmanger, meaning 'white-eating' or 'white-food', was a common high-class dish which occurs in recipe collections from all over medieval Europe. The basic ingredients were milk or almond milk, sugar and shredded chicken or capon, or fish (especially on fast days), often combined with rose-water, spices, and rice-flour, all simmered together until it would set firm. Its very whiteness and soft translucent form were thought to denote purity. It was nothing like its bastard offspring, the sickly-sweet, luridly-coloured children’s party food we call blancmange ... although even in Chaucer’s time there were showy festival versions of blancmanger that were brightly coloured with saffron, sandlewood, or herbs, and decorated with sweet, sometimes even gilded, confits.

By the 17th century this 'white-dish' had evolved into a meatless dessert made with cream and eggs, and by the late 18th century it had settled on almonds as the principal flavouring, with very little or no spice other than perhaps a tiny bit of cinnamon or nutmeg. Charles Francatelli – Queen Victoria’s cook, until he hit a maid and was dismissed – preferred the use of isinglass (from fish swim-bladders) or gelatine (laboriously extracted from pigs' or calves' trotters) as the main setting agents as they gave a more lustrous translucent gel, but other more plebian 19th century cooks tended to use arrowroot or cornflour, which were much cheaper. They also used cheap artificial food dyes and fruit-based flavourings. So the once courtly blancmanger - now fully evolved into the cloyingly sweet, insipid pink blancmange - was relegated to the children’s nursery. In 1907 Auguste Escoffier, referring to the old-fashioned white, almond-milk confection, wrote that "Blanc-manger is very rarely made nowadays, which is to be regretted because when well made it can be one of the best sweets served."

Here’s a 15th century recipe for blancmanger (from Corpus Christi College MS F 291) which unusually for the time is remarkably thorough and even gives quantities, something that would not become widespread for another century or so. The dish is not highly spiced, only the fried almond garnish is spiced at all, and this seems to be a proper ‘white’ dish, ... other recipes for blancmanger were not always as ‘white’ as their titles claimed.
 
Blawmanger - For vij dyschys, tak half a pownd of ryse; creve hem in a pot with water so þat þe water passe þe ryse by an enche. Qwhan þei boyle tak hem fro þe fyr. Mak good almaunde mylke, þickere & þennere, of ij daughtes. Cast þe secunde mylke to þe ryse. Tak þe brawne of capoun or of hennys, soden, & tese hem smal. Seþ þe pot with þe ryse & in þe sethyng cast to þe þicker mylk; þan cast to þe brawne, & boyle it & salt it. Tak blaunchyd almaundes & cut an almaunde on iij, & fryʒe hem. Cast among þese almaundes sugar broken; mynge þeramong clows. Leche þi potage in dyschys; cast above þin almaundes.
Half a pounde of ryse with j libra almoundes in jnowʒ for viij dyschys.
 
Blancmanger - For eight dishes, take half a pound of rice; cover it in a pot with water so that the water is over the rice by an inch. When it boils [probably actually meaning ‘when it is fully boiled’] take it from the fire. Make good almond milk, thicker and thinner, in two mixtures. Put the second [ie the thinner] milk with the rice. Take the lean meat of capon or of hens, boiled, and tease it small. Boil the pot with the rice and while it is boiling add the thicker milk; then add the meat, and boil it and salt it. Take blanched almonds and cut each almond in three, and fry them. Mix these almonds with broken sugar, and mix in cloves. Slice your pottage into dishes and sprinkle your almonds over it.
Half a pound of rice with one pound of almonds is enough for eight dishes.

.... so it looks like we're gonna need more rice and almonds:

Like the butcher who sat on his bacon slicer, I seem to be getting behind with my deliveries ...


26 October 1860 – The so-called 'Handshake of Teano' when the Italian nationalist and general Giuseppe Garibaldi met Victor Emanuel II, King of Sardinia. Having finally wrested the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from the Neapolitan Bourbons, Garibaldi shook Victor Emanuel's hand and hailed him as King of Italy. Garibaldi thus sacrificed republican hopes for the sake of Italian unity under a monarchy.


The 'Handshake of Teano'.

Guiseppe Garibaldi was a very popular figure amongst Britain’s working classes, particularly in Northern England, and, cashing in on this popularity the Garibaldi biscuit was named after him. It was invented by John Carr, one of the biscuit-making Carrs of Scotland (of water-biscuit fame) but he had left the family business to work for Peek Frean in Bermondsey, and it was they who launched the Garibaldi biscuit in 1861. History does not relate how Carr came up with his magic formula: the dry, not too sweet dough, the shiny glazed top, the squashed currants and the brilliant device of leaving strips of five biscuits joined together, like perforated cardboard. Being a Scot, Carr possibly borrowed the idea from shortbread petticoat tails, which also are subdivided before being eaten. And by enclosing the currants in a pastry sandwich, Garibaldi biscuits were probably also inspired by northern pastries such as Eccles Cakes and Chorley cakes. Indeed one creation myth is that Guiseppe Garibaldi himself  'invented' his biscuit when he accidentally sat on an Eccles Cake during his brief stay in 1854 on Tyneside.


Garibaldi biscuits.

Eccles cakes were certainly popular and sufficiently well-known, even in London, to be included in 'A Shilling Cookery for The People', by Alexis Soyer (London, 1845):

395. Eccles Cake.-To a quarter of a pound of currants half a teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, some lemon-peel chopped fine, one ounce of sugar, roll out about a quarter of a pound of puff paste, roll it round the size of a small plate, and nearly an inch thick (I suspect this is a typo as it seems far too thick), then put a tablespoonful of the mixture over it, roll another piece of paste over it, and bake a nice delicate colour.


Eccles cakes.

According to tradition, the history of Eccles cakes goes back to Mrs Elizabeth Raffald, a confectioner from Arley Hall (near Eccles) whose influential cookery book, 'The Experienced English Housekeeper' (1769) had a recipe for 'sweet patties'. However, Mrs Raffald's version included boiled calf's foot, apples, oranges, nutmeg, egg yolk, currants and brandy and could be baked or fried:

Sweet Patties.
TAKE the meat of a boiled calf's foot, two large apples, and one ounce of candied orange, chop them very small, grate half a nutmeg, mix them with the yolk of an egg, a spoonful of French brandy, and a quarter of a pound of currants clean washed and dried, make a good puff paste, roll it in different shapes as the fried ones, and fill them the fame way; you may either bake or fry them. They are a pretty side dish for supper.

Mrs Raffald's recipe looks as if it might have been adapted from 'Sweet Pattees' in the Yorkshire-published 'English Housewifry' by Elizabeth Moxon of five years earlier (1764):

122. To make sweet PATTEES.
Take the kidney of a loin of veal with the fat, when roasted shred it very fine, put to it a little shred mace, nutmeg and salt, about half a pound of currans, the juice of a lemon, and sugar to your taste, then bake them in puff-paste; you may either fry or bake them. They are proper for a side-dish.

But I digress.

Returning to Garibaldi biscuits … while some other biscuit creations of John Carr have not survived (such as the ‘Pearl biscuit’ – a crumbly plain biscuit probably rather similar to a rich tea, launched in 1860 – the Garibaldi has remained popular. They are of course still readily available for sale so one rarely needs to make them from scratch but I did find this fairly old recipe. It’s from the 'Nambour Chronicle and North Coast Advertiser' (Queensland, Australia), January 18, 1946 … perhaps an expatriate Pom couldn’t get the commercial variety in the 1940s, and so was forced to attempt them at home.

Garibaldi Biscuits
Take four oz. of self-raising flour, one oz. of margarine or butter, one oz. cf sugar one oz. of chopped sultanas, or raisins a pinch of salt and milk to mix. Chop up the sultanas or stoned raisins. Sieve the flour and salt into a basin. Rub in the margarine or butter and add the sugar. Mix to a very stiff paste, using as little milk as possible. It is better to do the mixing with the hand, and knead the ingredients together. By this way it is much easier to keep the mixture firm, and net too wet. Roll out on to a floured board to about an eighth of an inch in thickness. Cut the paste in half, and on one half spread over the chopped sultanas. Then place the other half of the paste on top and again roll out to an eighth of an inch in thickness. With a sharp knife cut into fingers, or use a pastry cutter to make circles. Place on a well-greased baking sheet and bake in a moderately hot oven for 15 minutes.

Garibaldi - or perhaps Garrybaldi - would be a good name for your new moggy, MM. There is a dog called GarryOwen (sic - all one word) in Joyce's Ulysses. I think, however, Garry Owen is the name of an old tune, or, more correctly, it is the title of an "air". I quite like the idea of being named after a biscuit.

"Garryowen" was the best the English could come up with when faced with having to pronounce Gearraí Eoin in Limerick (their stab at "Luimhneagh"). So it did start as two words, as you can see, and refers to John's Garden - the grounds of the church of St John which had been built by the Knights Templar.

Nowadays a "garryowen" is, as well as a faux-Irish military quickstep the Brits commandeered, an extremely high lofted rugby ball which is so long up in the stratosphere that the whole team can get up the pitch and, if they win the 50/50 tussle to catch it, still be onside and close to the try line. A team from Garryowen perfected the imperfect technique.

Dogs in Dublin one likes to kick with force can be called Garryowen, as Joyce - the fraud - pretended to have invented.

A day late again, but I’m not letting this one pass ....
 
31 October 1517 – Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of All Saints' Church (which also served as the University church) in Wittenberg. These theses were ostensibly intended to begin a debate among academics rather than a popular revolution, and far from being a protest, nailing a proposition on the church door was the formal way to initiate a scholarly debate (although there is no evidence that such a disputation ever took place). Nevertheless Luther’s action of posting his theses on the door of All Saint’s church on All Saints’ Day, does seem to have been deliberately provocative.
 
Posting his theses was just the beginning. Three years later Luther published three pamphlets which entirely changed the religious discourse. In the summer of 1520 appeared An Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, in which he urged the temporal owers to lead and guide their communities outside the Roman jurisdiction. A few months later he published a short treatise, Concerning the Babylonish Captivity of the Church, in which he attacked the sacramental system of the Catholic faith and insisted that the gospels lent their authority only to baptism, confession and communion. His last work in this year of invective was entitled On the Liberty of a Christian Man, and provided a succinct account of his speculations on faith, free will and good works – with the doctrine that true freedom can be obtained by faith alone – good works do not mean merit or salvation.
 
With the publication of these three works Luther lost the sympathy of those, such as Erasmus, who had seen him as a possible ally. He had gone too far in his attack on the Church’s authority and its sacramental system, to be considered a humanist reformer. Pope Leo X issued a bull threatening excommunication, Exsurge Domine, which Luther publicly burned in Wittenberg, and so in January 1521 he was duly excommunicated.
 
In England, Henry VIII took a central role in combating all this new heresy. The year after Luther had posted his ninety-five theses, Henry had started work on a book condemning the message from Wittenberg. In 1521, with Luther’s defiance now manifest, Henry completed this work, which he published with the catchy title of Assertio septum Sacramentorum adversus Martin Lutherum. Henry’s book was presented to the Pope and the pontiff rewarded Henry with the title of ‘Fidei defensor’ - Defender of the Faith. Martin Luther was not slow in presenting his royal opponent with his own, less welcome, gift: he published a diatribe against Henry and did not shy away from describing the King of England as a pig, a dolt, and a liar who deserved, amongst other things, to be “covered in excrement”.
 
Thomas More now entered the fray. He was ordered by his royal master to compose a suitable reply in the same vitriolic terms, trading text for text and insult for insult. More - the devout, educated, royal councillor, diplomat and learned man of letters - showed himself to have an aptitude for swearing, gutter talk and name-calling ... in Latin. In his Responsio ad Lutherum, he called Luther an ape ("siminum"), an ass, ("asinus"), a drunkard ("potista"), a lousy little monk ("pediculolosus fraterculus"), a pestilential buffoon ("pestintissimum scurram"), a lying friar ("improbe mendax") ... and he continued, saying someone should shit ("incacare") or piss ("meiere") into Luther’s mouth, calling him a shit-devil ("cacode-mon"), who was full of shit ("merda"), dung ("stercus"), filth ("lutum") and excrement ("coenum"), and claimed that Luther was so blasphemous that he even celebrated Mass on the toilet ("super foricam"). Actually Luther - who once described himself as being "like ripe shit" ready to break away from the world that he likened to "a gigantic arse-hole" - did say that he’d been visited by the Holy Spirit while he was on the privy. He also claimed that the Spirit was so strong in him that he reckoned he could drive away the devil "with a single fart".
 
Enough! … before we all lose our appetites. But nevertheless, in continuation of today’s rather scatological theme, I have two suitable dishes.
 
The first is pumpernickel bread. The name, pumpernickel, is generally supposed to derive from old medieval German meaning ‘Devil’s Farts’, on account of it being rather prone to causing flatulence (though I’ll admit there are other etymologies). It is a very ancient type of German bread, first recorded by name in print in 1450. Pumpernickel, or something very similar, would have been well-known to Luther, despite the true pumpernickel recipe being traditional only to Westphalia, while Luther’s Wittenberg is further east in Saxony.
 
Pumpernickel is a dark, dense rye bread cooked extremely slowly, and which traditionally has no obvious leavening, although it does tend to spontaneously ferment during the long rest before baking, and some more modern recipes do use sourdough. It is steamed rather than baked and the slow cooking ensures it keeps very, very well. Pumpernickel will generally keep for many weeks, if not months, and so it could prove to be a German peasant’s life-saver, especially during the decades of religious conflict following the Protestant reformation. I won’t give a recipe as there are many to be found either on-line or in popular bread-making literature.
 
And in rememberance of Thomas More’s counter-blast, I propose the Tudor dish, 'Farts'.
 
Farts (… or Fartes or Fertes, or Fettes) is most definitely not a mis-reading of ‘tarts’. They were a type of ‘whet’, that is a little titbit, like a modern canapé or amuse-bouche,  … something light and tasty to whet the appetite and titillate the palate. They were most likely served (only to the top table of course) not before the banquet as one might now serve canapés, but between courses to accompany the ceremonial presentation of a splendid subtlety (such as a huge heraldic pie or elaborate cake), or perhaps during a musical or dramatic interlude while the servants cleared the tables ready for the next course of dishes. “Fertes with other Subtelties” are recorded as being served with hippocras (spiced wine) at Archbishop Warham’s enthronement feast in 1504.
 
'A book of cookrye. Very necessary for all such as delight therin', by 'AW’ (1591) gives the following recipe for Portuguese-stye farts.
 
To make Farts of Portingale.
Take a quart of life Hony, and set it upon the fire and when it seetheth scum it clean, and then put in a certaine of fine Biskets well serced, and some pouder of Cloves, some Ginger, and powder of sinamon, Annis seeds and some Sugar, and let all these be well stirred upon the fire, til it be as thicke as you thinke needfull, and for the paste for them take Flower as finelye dressed as may be, and a good peece of sweet Butter, and woorke all these same well togither, and not knead it. [... and then finally, I presume, bake it].


However if you do a google search for ‘tudor fart recipes’ you will inevitably get some “authentic” ones that are for a type of spicy meatball. These generally all derive from a recipe in the 'The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin', by Thomas Dawson (1594), ie published just a few years after AW's, 'A book of cookrye'. Thomas Dawson’s book however is only known from a few incomplete copies and reprints and I suspect somewhere along the way - between the original hand-written pages being delivered to the printer and later edited reprints (most notably that of 1596) - some serious type-setting errors have crept in. It is interesting that in the editions of the 'The Good Huswife’s Handmaide' that are available on line, the recipe for ‘Farts of Portigale’ (as meatballs) occurs immediately before the recipe for ‘Fystes of Portigale’ (which is for a spicy pastry and so a bit more like the recipe given by AW:

From, 'The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin’, by Thomas Dawson (1594 and 1596):

How to make Farts of Portingale.
TAke a peece of a leg of Mutton, mince it smal and season it with cloues, Mace pepper and salt, and Dates minced with currans: then roll it into round rolles, and so into little balles, and so boyle them in a little beefe broth and so serue them foorth.

How to make Fystes of Portingale.
TAke some sweet suet minced small, the yolks of two egs, with grated bread and currans: temper al these together with a litle saffron, sinamon, ginger, and a litle salt: then seeth them in a litle Bastard or sack a little while: and when they haue boiled a litle take it vp, and cast some sugar to it, & so make bals of it as big as tennis balles, & lay foure or fiue in a dish, and powre on some of the broth that they were sodden in, and so serue them.


…. So although I can’t yet prove it, I think that the meatball recipe should actually be called fystes (ie for hand-sized or fist-sized meatballs, rolled in the palm of the hand) and that farts is the other one.
 
Anyway there you go, today’s dish-of-the-day is Farts with Farty-bread.

MM wrote:

 
Anyway there you go, today’s dish-of-the-day is Farts with Farty-bread.

I love pumpernickel bread - and it never causes problems when its yeast colonises (!) my innards - I expect because I take a yoghurt tablet every day (and I eat lots of bio-yoghurt, too).

Excellent post, as always.

You mentioned Tyndale (well you did until you inexplicably deleted it) ... I rather suspect that people in 16th century England generally spoke like that - if the Lord Chancellor could put such expressions into print, albeit in Latin, then I'm sure the barrow-boys and fish-wives in London's streets did too. Even when More is writing in English, such as in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, I seem to recall he frequently makes use of sexual and scatalogical terms to illustrate his point: mentioning privy members, impotent men, lewd whores, offal and excrement, alongside his theological arguments. I particlarly remember his rather charming but odd expression, "to tourne a plum into a doggys torde in a boyes mouthe".

I was going to say that this sort of language is reminiscent of some of the vernacular medieval tales in Boccaccio's Decameron or Chaucer's Canturbury Tales, and of some of the bawdier word play in Shakespeare, ... but More's extreme language in his diatribes against heretics such as Luther and Tyndale - and theirs against him - is perhaps closer to that of Rabelais, again writing in the common-people's language of 16th century France. Wasn't Rabelais also, like Luther, originally a monk?

I think he was, MM.

I deleted the Tyndale reference because it was off the topic of food, but yes, he too was a bit of a potty-mouth - as you say, who wasn't back then?

I posted this a while ago on the Insults thread:

Tyndale was shocking. I remember when Melvyn Bragg presented his programme on this great Bible scholar recently, he had at one point to give a warning and an apology for what he was about to read out. The appalling comments that followed were all from Tyndale about Thomas More. I seem to remember one - which I certainly can't repeat here -  about More and the bottom of a p*ssing she-ass. But I might have it wrong: that might have been one of Luther's about His Holiness in Rome.


What always amused me was how Luther, at the opening of his scathing response on Free Will, addressed to his great opponent, Erasmus, began with:

"To the Venerable Master Erasmus of Rotterdam, Martin Luther wishes Grace and Peace in Christ."

Then, a few slices of Katharina's excellent pumpernickel bread later...

Nordmann has been a little ungracious about my peace offering of a custard cream over on the British Empire thread, MM. It must be admitted that this biscuit is a particularly revolting one, and is to be eaten only if the alternative is starvation.

Do you know anything of the history of the custard cream? It is an odd idea - and name - for a biscuit. Most biscuit names are odd though, I suppose. Why is a ginger nut called a nut?

I'm still investigating custard creams ... but in the meantime I can tell you that the ginger nut seems to have quite a long history.

'The Art of Cookery Made Easy and Refined' by John Mollard (1802) has this:

GOOD GINGERBREAD NUTS,
Take four pounds of flour, half a pound of sifted sugar, one ounce of carraway seeds, half an ounce of ginger pounded and sifted, six ounces of fresh butter, and two ounces of candied orenge peel cut into small slices. Then take a pound of treacle or honey and a gill of cream, make them warm together, mix all the ingredients into a paste, and let it lay six hours; then roll it out, shape it into nuts, and bake them in a moderate oven.

Furthermore, Charles Francatelli - who, as I've mentioned before, was briefly Queen Victoria's cook, until he blotted his copy-book by hitting a maid and so was dismissed - in his book 'Plain Cookery for the Working Classes' (1852), for his Gingerbread Nuts recipe explains that the dough should be "rolled into balls the size of a walnut".

... So I rather suspect that they were called ginger nuts because they were originally made into something resembling a nut shape.

You might also be interested in this snippet of news, from 'The Times', 27 June 1892:

"During Mr Gladstone's progress through the streets there was a most regrettable occurrence. Baron Halkett, who was in the carriage with Mr Gladstone, states that he saw a woman raise her hand and throw something with great violence towards Mr Gladstone. It struck him in the corner of the left eye and inflicted a slight wound and caused bleeding of the nose.
Mr Gladstone immediately put his hand over his eye and fell back into his carriage and said to Baron Halkett, 'It was a cruel thing to do. I hope some notice will be taken of it.' The substance thrown fell upon the knees of Mr James Tomkinson and turned out to be a hard gingerbread nut."

.... well yes, gingernut biscuits can be notoriously hard!

This will lower the tone of the erudite discussions but this made me laugh and surely a banana surprise could be dish of the day, any day, if you have the right equipment. If you have not purchased a Yumstation then any normal uro-genital department could supply you with the necessary bits and pieces.
The procedure would of course be easier with an EU approved straight banana.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/26/kitchen-gadgets-review-banana-surprise-yumstation

Have you only just discovered the delights of Rhik Samadder's weekly 'Inspect-a-gadget' articles? Always full of double-entendres and cheeky cultural and culinary allusions, it's by far the best thing on the Guardian's Website these days. And if you are really a new-comer, I urge you to also read the often hillarious comments btl (below-the-line) ... he has quite a eager, indeed enamoured, following.

No, I read him whenever I remember to look but I thought this one was particularly funny and ridiculous although perhaps not quite reaching the heights (depths?) of this classic.


https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/15/kitchen-gadgets-review-egg-master-horrifying-unholy-affair

I like the one about the gadget for making square eggs (medieval device for hen torture).

“Consider God’s handiwork: who can make straight, what He hath made crooked?” These words, from Ecclesiastes, pose a pertinent question. With this week’s abomination, the answer is: anyone. “Put a round egg in … and get a square egg out!” boasts the box. Geometrically, this is wrong on both counts because we’re talking about ovoids and cubes, but there’s no point being pedantegg. "

Rhik Samadder shares my love of the word "abomination", as in "It is an abomination unto the Lord". The man is clearly steeped in the KJV. He is brilliant.

23 November - Today is the feast day of St Clement.

Clement or "Old Clem" was a disciple of St Peter until he was banished from Rome during the reign of the Emperor Trajan and forced to work in a stone quarry (making him the patron saint of quarry workers and stone cutters). When his fellow prisoners were suffering from lack of water, he prayed, a holy lamb appeared, and when he struck the ground with his pick-axe where the lamb had stood, a spring of clear water gushed forth (he is also the patron saint of water diviners and diggers of wells). This miracle resulted in the conversion of a large number of his fellow prisoners and local people to Christianity. As punishment St Clement was martyred by being tied to an anchor and thrown from a boat into the Black Sea (he is the patron saint of mariners too).

He is - or rather a London church dedicated to him is - also the opening star of the nursery rhyme and children’s game of "Oranges and Lemons" (... you can guess where this is leading).

Oranges and lemons.
Say the bells of St Clement’s.

You owe me five fathings.
Say the bells of St Martin’s.

When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich.
Say the bells of Shoreditch.

When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know.
Says the great bell of Bow.

The rhyme ostensibly refers to the ringing bells of a number of churches in the City of London, and there are two contenders for the "St Clement’s" – St. Clement Danes (in The Strand) and St Clement Eastcheap (near London Bridge). There are many interpretations of the possible symbolism and meaning of the rhyme, but no convincing historic associations between either of these churches and citrus fruit. Nevertheless both the current churches go to great lengths to promote their own particular claim. Actually, since the nursery rhyme only dates to about 1740, the "oranges and lemons" may simply have been a convenient rhyme to go with "St Clement’s".  To my mind St Clement’s in Eastcheap might have the slight advantage as it is actually within the old city walls and is closer to Billingsate, which was the designated water-gate (ie landing stage) not only for fresh fish, but also for all ships from Spain and the Mediterranean, with their cargoes of wines, pomegranates, Spanish onions, and yes, oranges and lemons. But even if the actual link of St Clement to citrus fruit is somewhat tenuous, his church in Eastcheap does nevertheless have a foody connection.

In medieval London The Worshipful Company of Bakers (until it split into two: the Brown Bakers and the White Bakers) was known as the "Fraternity or Guylde of Our Lady and St Clement", simply because London’s bakers were mostly concentrated in the same area and they mostly all worshipped in the same parish church of St Clement, Eastcheap. St Clement remains the Company’s patron saint although the company’s church is now All Hallows by the Tower as that is the nearest church to the present guildhall. The old guildhall - and the old St Clement’s church – were both destroyed in the 1666 Fire of London which of course started in the heart of the baking district, in the premises of "Mr Farynor, the King’s Baker, in Pudding Lane" … although it was the Luftwaffe that eventually forced Baker’s Hall to relocate closer to the Tower. Nevertheless it is on St Clement’s Day (actually the nearest Monday to it) that the annual election of the Master and Officers of the Worshipful Company of Bakers are held, and this is still followed by a by a church service, nowadays in All Hallows by the Tower.

So with St Clement’s connections to both baking and citrus fruits, for today’s celebratory dish I propose toast and marmalade.

In England mamalade was originally made from quinces, the word coming from the Portuguese word for that fruit, marmelo.  From the times of the crusades onwards oranges and lemons were known in England but they were not common – Eleanor of Castille, wife of Edward I, pining for the taste of her homeland, requisitioned the entire shipment of these rare fruits that had just arrived by ship into Portsmouth, but was disappointed to find that all the ship’s master had managed to acquire in Spain was just fifteen thick-skinned citrons and seven oranges. But quinces would grow satisfactorily in the English climate and furthermore they could also be used to produce a good set gel as they contain a lot of pectin. In 1524 Henry VIII received a "box of mamalade from Mr Hull of Exeter" which as it was in a box suggests it was a solid quince paste of the type, then as now, made throughout Iberia, and which in Portugal was called marmelada.



This is pâte de coing, quince paste, made to a modern French recipe.

The first printed recipe for spreadable orange marmalade, albeit without the chunks typically added now, is often said to be the one given in Mary Kettiby’s 1714 book: ‘A Collection of above Three Hundred Recipes’. This is from the 5th edition of 1734:



However I’m not convinced that the spreadability issue is down to improvements in the recipe but simply down to fashion. For example take this recipe from a century before Mary Kettiby’s one: from Sir Hugh Platt’s 1609 book ‘Delightes for Ladies’ (note he adds pippin apples to the lemons and oranges – in part I guess to eke out the expensive imported fruit with cheaper local produce, but also to get a good set by providing more pectin (not that he would have known what pectin was).

To make  mamalade of Lemmons or Oranges – Take ten Lemmons or Oranges and boyle them with halfe a dozen pippins, and so drawe them through a strainer, then take so much sugar as the pulp dooth weigh, and boyle it as you doe Marmalade of Quinces, and boxe it up.

His final instruction to "boxe it up" again implies that it was supposed to be a semi-solid candied paste. However the instruction to "take so much sugar as the pulp dooth weigh" is basically the same as any modern recipe, and as any modern jam or marmalade maker knows this proportion is not guaranteed to give a set gel. If you don’t boil it long enough  Hugh Platt’s mamalade, far from coming out as a fruit candy bar could easily have been too runny even to pass as a proper spreadable preserve. Alternatively if you spread marmalade out fairly thinly to dry for a good few days, you will get a fairly solid product - that is after all exactly how pâte de coing is made.

I suggest the shift to lightly gelled spreadable marmalade has less to do with the recipes used and more about changing eating habits. When Hugh Platt wrote his book, forks as tableware were really only starting to come into use in England, and people still mostly ate using just a knife - which was used both to cut and to spear food from the shared platter – or they simply used their hands even in the politest company. Accordingly knives were still very much pointed at the end, like a dagger. It was not thought polite to use the knife to scoop up food from the shared mess bowl nor was it good manners to use it to spread food around on your plate because then you risked putting some of it back into the shared dish (like ill-bred people today who insist on using the same knife to butter their bread, then to scoop jam from the pot and to spread it on their bread, and then with the next slice proceed to dip the same buttery/jammy/bread-crumby knife into the jar of honey ... ugh!).

Sloppy soft things, like fresh cheeses, thick pottages, creamy syllabubs, custardy blanchmanges etc, if they were not provided with a crust (such as in the form a tart) and so intended to be eaten by hand, were either eaten with a spoon or scooped up with a morsel of bread or roast meat ... but the nibbled bread morsel or chicken leg was never, of course, dipped a second time into the shared sauce for another scoop. Bread that was intended to be eaten was always broken rather than cut, and it was certainly never cut into slices. A cut slice of bread - a tranche - was only ever to be used as a trencher (hence the word) that is an absorbant platter, which would be collected up after each course to be given away as alms to the poor. It would have been the most appalling bad manners to eat your trencher. So the idea of spreading some confection onto a slice of bread was still probably anathema to most people, or at least those aspiring to having any manners, well into the 17th century, by which time bread trenchers had mostly been long abandoned and replaced by platters and plates made of pewter, wood, earthenware, or even fine porcelain.

Also incidentally, regarding the use of knives, it was the French chef La Varenne who seems to have been largely instrumental in introducing the blunt, round-ended dinner knife to polite mid-17th century French society. He was apparently so disgusted by seeing people use his pointed dinner knives to pick their teeth, and then proceed to use the same knife to help themselves to some more from the main dish, that he had all the tips ground off. Perhaps it is also no coincidence that his own cookbook ‘Le Cuisinier Française’ (1653) includes two recipes for marmalade: one set firm to be eaten by hand, the other semi-liquid which could be spread.

A further piece of evidence that the shift towards modern soft-set English marmalade is this recipe by Hannah Wooley, from ‘The Queene-like Closet’ (1672). She uses a pound of sugar to a pint of water which again are the proportions commonly used today (it’s the same ratio of quantities that Mrs Beeton advocated in 1861).

To make Marmalade of Oranges or Limons.
Boil the Rinds of them in several Waters till they be very tender, beat them small with their weight of Pippins, then take the weight of all in fine Sugar, and to every Pound of Sugar, a Pint of Water, boil your Water and Sugar together, and make a Syrup, then put in your Pulp, and boil it a good while till it be clear, then put in the Juice of some Orange and Limon, so much as will give it a fine taste, then boil it a little longer till you see it will jelly very well, then put it into Glasses, and keep it in a reasonable warm place; this is very Cordial, and stoppeth Rheum.

The instruction to "put it into Glasses, and keep it in a reasonable warm place" suggests she doesn’t mean pour into jars to be kept a long time, rather her mamalade is to be eaten immediately as a dessert or cordial using a spoon, and so, although not quite how most people eat marmalade today, it is still clearly far removed from Henry VIII’s chewy candybar in a box.

And if marmalade on toast doesn’t seem substantial enough for today’s dish then you can always use some of the marmalade – made with whichever recipe- to make this very filling dessert:

Orange Marmalade Pudding.
Mix six ounces of grated bread-crumbs with three ounces of finely-shred beef suet. Add a pinch of salt, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of powdered ginger, half a tea-spoonful of baking powder, half an ounce of candied lemon-peel chopped small, two tablespoonfuls of moist sugar, three well-beaten eggs, and a quarter of a pint of new milk. Take a well-buttered mould, spread a layer of the mixture at the bottom, then put a layer of orange marmalade, and repeat until the mould is full, being careful to let the mixture be at the top of the pudding. Bake in a moderate oven, and turn out before serving. Time – 2 hours to bake the pudding.

'Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery' (1876).

I've been mulling over this and I think that the 1734 recipe would produce something between membrillo and a smooth jam in texture since it doesn't appear to use any liquid other than the fruit juices. The squeezed oranges are certainly boiled in water but then drained, dried and pounded to a pulp and then boiled with an equal weight of sugar. Maybe some liquid was added there? Does 'candy height' mean something like hard/soft ball do you think? They didn't have sugar thermometers, did they? And what is shisting? Changing?
This pulp is then reboiled with the fruit juice and more sugar equal in weight to the juice. If the water that the pith and seeds were boiled in was discarded along with most of the pectin it would take a lot of boiling before it would set. That's the way I read it anyway and I fancy giving it a try when the Sevilles come in, I often seem to have a hard-peel problem and this would cure that.
Yes, in jams and jellies it's usually one pound of sugar to one pint of juice, not equal weight to weight of pulp as in the Hugh Platt example, my marmalade recipe uses twice the weight of sugar to weight of fruit so for 1 kg of oranges (and added lemon) the juice is made up to 2l with water and boiled with 2kg sugar. That's very close to the ratio in the first recipe.

ferval wrote:

And what is shisting? Changing?

I believe so, yes .......Oh the joys of ʃeventeenth century orthography ... I think it's actually "shifting", and so as you say, it means "changing" the water ...  and so that particular bit of the process I took to mean a sort-of softening, preliminary cook.

But I agreed it does seem odd and un-necessary, if not actually unhelpful.

My problem is usually to get the stuff to set without excessive boiling - which not only darkens the colour but can muck up the flavour by caremellising the sugars. But then I'll freely admit that I tend to work rather fast and loose with quantities and times ... I'm not very good at following recipes and being exact.

ferval wrote:

Yes, in jams and jellies it's usually one pound of sugar to one pint of juice, not equal weight to weight of pulp as in the Hugh Platt example, my marmalade recipe uses twice the weight of sugar to weight of fruit so for 1 kg of oranges (and added lemon) the juice is made up to 2l with water and boiled with 2kg sugar. That's very close to the ratio in the first recipe.

Yes indeed ... but doesn't that mean that Sir Hugh Platt's marmalade would likely be even runnier? Certainly his sweetmeat wouldn't be stiff enough to Delighte to any Lady.