COOKING FROM THE BAROQUE TO THE VICTORIAN ERA
Overview
New culinary procedures
• The international triumph of French court cooking
• New ingredients: potato, tomato, chocolate, tea, coffee, pineapple
• Science in the kitchen: artificial freezing
• Improving culinary equipment
• The table setting introduced
During the two centuries covered by this book, unprecedented changes took place in the foodways and dining habits of European society. Of these, the most important was a dramatic shift in culinary taste led by the exuberant creativity of French cooks.
At the beginning of this period, meat and fish dishes seasoned with spices, sugar, and fruit were popular. These foods, widespread since the medieval period, were ultimately derived from Arab and Persian culinary traditions. Spicy soups of chicken and prunes, pies filled with meatballs cooked in a sauce of sour grapes, and crab seasoned with spice and gooseberries were typical of this culinary style. Floral waters and candied peels were also frequently included in meat dishes and sauces, particularly in Spain and Italy. Sugar was widely used as a seasoning to enhance the flavors of savory dishes. Ravioli, for instance, was dredged with grated Parmesan cheese, powdered sugar, and cinnamon. Sugar was also frequently combined with acidic fruit juices to create a sweet-sour effect in meat and fish dishes. Some important changes had already taken place in the sixteenth century, when a number of spices popular in medieval cookery, like cubebs, galingale, and grains of paradise, disappeared from the kitchen cupboard. However, the gradual movement away from the sweet-sour culinary style did not really begin in France until after 1630. Unfortunately no French recipe books were published between 1560 and 1651, so it is not possible to gauge exactly when this trend began.
During the 1650s, cookbooks started to emerge from the Paris printing presses after a hundred years of silence, and it is evident that immense advances had taken place in French cooking. As will be seen in the first recipe section of this book, the old mixtures of sweet and sour were still to be found in these new collections, but alongside them there were subtle new flavor combinations based on herbs, mushrooms, and savory elements. The use of spices was more restrained; cinnamon, for instance, tended to be restricted to sweet dishes.
In 1660, a new culinary preparation known as coulis was described for the first time. This ready-prepared meat or fi sh concentrate, with its thickening of flour and intense fl avoring, became a signature feature of the new style of French cooking, allowing the cook to heighten the tang of a sauce or soup in a moment with a quick stir of a wooden spoon.
Roux, a liaison of flour and fat used as a thickening, was another new addition to the cook’s repertoire of stock ingredients. In the old days, sauces and soups had always been thickened with breadcrumbs or pounded almonds. It took about a hundred years for these innovations to completely transform French cuisine and sweep away all remnants of lingering medieval taste. By the 1750s French cookbooks had been purged of old-fashioned recipes, though some of these lingered in the cookery traditions of other nations.
Another great French innovation was the foundation of what is often called the modular system of cooking. This methodical approach allowed a dish to be assembled quickly from ready-prepared ingredients that were always kept at hand. Little ceramic pots of roux, stockpots of simmering bouillon (stock), and jars of flavor-rich coulis were standard in all well organized French kitchens.
This afforded tremendous flexibility to the cook, giving him scope to improvise new dishes and combinations of flavors with minimum effort. In the later eighteenth century, coulis was displaced by two important stock sauces—velouté (white sauce) and espagnole (brown sauce). These were freshly made up every morning and used as a basis for preparing many other sauces and for adding fl avor, color, and texture to a huge variety of dishes.
It must be understood that these changes took place at a very high social level and were initially confi ned to the kitchens of the powerful and wealthy. Foreign ambassadors and visitors to the court of King Louis XIV (1643–1715) were particularly impressed with the lavish hospitality and the innovative new style of cooking emanating from the royal kitchens. Dining and entertainments at this court were on a monumental scale and dishes were often rich in expensive ingredients like truffles and morels. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, most other European courts had adopted the new style of dining. In princely palaces from Stockholm to Dresden, high-status French cooking had displaced old-fashioned court cuisines with their displays of peacock pies and roast herons. France had established itself as a culinary superpower.
A principal theme in the story of food during the ensuing two centuries was the rapid spread of French fine cooking throughout Europe and its gradual percolation down the social scale. However, this is far from being the whole story, and despite the domination of French cuisine at higher levels, most nations managed to cling proudly to their own indigenous traditions.
New Ingredients
Many new foods from the Americas, like maize, potatoes, tomatoes, capsicums, and squashes, started to arrive in Europe during the course of the sixteenth century. Some, like the turkey, were quickly adopted, but it took much longer for the potential of others to be realized. The Spanish and Portuguese, with their colonies in Central and South America, were the first to exploit many of these novel foods. Potatoes and tomatoes were particularly slow to be adopted by Europeans. Early botanists recognized them as belonging to a plant family with many poisonous members, and there was considerable resistance to their use as foods.
Nowadays we associate the tomato with Italian pasta dishes, particularly those in the Neapolitan tradition, but these did not really appear on the scene until the nineteenth century. When the Spanish started to introduce the tomato into Naples toward the end of the seventeenth century, it was only featured in a handful of dishes. Even a hundred years later it was not being used as much in Neapolitan sauces as sour grapes or oranges.
Chocolate imported from Central America became a popular drink in Spain during the second half of the sixteenth century, but its use did not become widespread throughout Europe until a hundred years later. Although a few cacao-based sweetmeats appeared in the seventeenth century, chocolate confections did not become really significant until the nineteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, when chocolate drinking was making inroads into European courts, tea and coffee were also gaining immense importance as social beverages. However, they were expensive luxuries and it was a long time before they became available to all. Although it was an Old World foodstuff known since classical antiquity, sugar became cheaper and much more widespread during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was due to the initiative of Portuguese and British planters who exploited the equable climate of their South American and Caribbean colonies to grow sugarcane in vast quantities. Consequently, the range of confections and preserves available to Europeans grew enormously during this period.
Other discoveries in the Americas that proved signifi cant to the confectioner were vanilla and pineapples. Vanilla, introduced into Naples by its Spanish ruling class, found its way into Neapolitan frozen desserts as early as the 1690s. Pineapples could not survive the long voyage across the Atlantic, so a few enthusiastic botanists explored methods of cultivating them in Europe. By the eighteenth century they were even being grown in chilly England in heated greenhouses. The introduction of some New World species had surprising results. In the eighteenth century, chance pollination in a French garden between a strawberry species from Chile and another from Virginia resulted in a brand new large-fruited strawberry that became the ancestor of our modern varieties. However, it was not just chance that led to many new discoveries. More systematic approaches to understanding the natural world were being developed by botanists and horticulturalists. These would have a direct impact on the development of improved varieties of fruits and vegetables. An air of experimentation was everywhere. In Naples, even street vendors were becoming familiar with the newly discovered refrigerant properties of salt and ice mixtures and were developing the first European ices. On the outskirts of the same city, large workshops mass-producing dried pasta with large screw presses became Europe’s first food factories.
Kitchens and Culinary Equipment
There were many improvements in cooking facilities during this period. Roasting still took place in front of large fireplaces, but mechanical spitturning mechanisms became much more commonplace and were even used in farmhouses. In England, with its rich coalfields, coal became the preferred cooking medium. It was cheap and enabled meats to be cooked to perfection in front of newly designed roasting ranges with raised fire baskets. These pushed out a much fi ercer radiant heat than the old down-hearths, where wood was burnt at fl oor level. As a result the atmosphere of British towns became heavily polluted. But what did this matter, when the Englishman’s table could be dressed with the finest roast meats to be found anywhere in Europe? It was in the realm of fine cookery that the most important developments took place. The increasing use of the charcoal stewing stove enabled precise temperature control for the production of demanding sauces and cooking delicate foods like fish to perfection. These stoves were usually located at a good working height under large windows.
This allowed optimum illumination and a means for the escape of noxious fumes. New flat bottomed copper stewpans began to replace bronze pots with tripod legs, which were used for cooking over embers at ground level. Cauldrons hanging over smoky fires gave way more and more to purpose-built boilers with their own enclosed furnaces. As a result, cooking processes became cleaner and less backbreaking. In substantial households, the area of the building designated for food preparation was a complex of purpose-built rooms. In addition to the kitchen, there were usually various larders for storage and a separate pastry room. In France, salads, confections, and other dessert foods were prepared in a separate suite of rooms called the office. The officier (confectioner) who presided over this workshop was frequently the highest-paid culinary professional in the establishment. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the officier’s role was completely separate from that of the pâtissier (pastry cook), who also worked in his own specific space. However, after the French Revolution, the two tasks became synonymous. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coppersmiths and iron founders provided both domestic and professional cooks with a remarkable new range of braising pans, saucepans, and sugar boilers. An almost infinite variety of copper, pewter, wooden, and ceramic molds also became available, enabling the creation of some of the most decorative dishes ever displayed on European tables.
The Table Setting
Dramatic changes also took place in the way in which food was presented and consumed at table. A spectacular new dining protocol emerged from Versailles and took other European courts by storm. This was service à la Française (table service in the French manner), which evolved from Italian Renaissance methods of regulating the table. As in earlier periods, the food was set out in a series of buffet-like arrangements called courses. The chief innovations of service à la Française were in the first and final courses of the meal.
The first course of a dinner served in this way featured a choice of rich soups and stews called the grosses entrées. By the early eighteenth century these were being served in spectacular new vessels called tureens, made of silver or silver gilt. After the soups and stews had been served, the tureens were removed from the table, leaving what were considered to be unsightly empty spaces. These voids were immediately fi lled with other substantial fish and meat dishes called relevés—known as removes in English. Other important dishes presented in the fi rst course were the roti—roast—and the hors d’oeuvres, which were not little starters like today, but smaller dishes scattered symmetrically between the grosses entrées. The second course of the meal usually consisted of an array of less substantial meat and fish dishes and included both savory and sweet entremets—vegetable dishes and sweet pastries.
The final course was called le fruit—the fruit—or le dessert. This was derived from the issue de la table of the medieval period, when the sovereign was given sweetmeats and spiced wine for his digestion. It was a spectacular finale to the meal, containing sumptuous arrangements of fruit, confections, cookies, and ices. In the seventeenth century it was fashionable to arrange the dessert foods in high pyramids on ascending salvers.
By the middle of the eighteenth century it was often laid out as a tabletop formal garden, complete with sugar sculpture and porcelain figures. In seventeenth-century Italy, high-status tables were often graced with spectacular sugar sculptures called trionfi—triumphs. These usually had emblematic or symbolic meanings. One of a number presented at a feast in Rome in 1686 in honor of James II of England was in the form of Neptune, referring to the King’s role as Admiral of the Fleet. Although service à la Française created a great spectacle, it had its drawbacks, one being that many dishes on the table became cold while the guests were eating their soup. To correct this, a new pattern of dining emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century and became known as service à la Russe—service in the Russian style.
Allegedly introduced into Paris by a Russian prince called Alexander Kurakin, this involved serving the individual dishes of the meal sequentially—that is one at a time, rather like we do nowadays. This new procedure of service was slow to catch on, but by the end of the nineteenth century it eventually displaced service à la Française.
Salads
Instructions for making salads are rather sparse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French cookbooks. There are only three in La Varenne’s. Le cuisinier François (1651), the most important cookbook of its time. However, during this period, salads were not the responsibility of the cook and were rarely made in the kitchen. They were assembled in the office, or confectionery, far from the overbearing heat of the great roasting fires and stoves, which could easily wither the freshly picked greens and herbs. This is why the most complete collection of salad recipes from this early period is in a little book on confections rather than cooking called 'Le Confiturier Royal', published in 1662. As well as a range of salad recipes suitable for the different seasons of the year, it contains detailed instructions for making an elaborate salad in the form of a royal crown.
On the whole the French had a preference for very simple salads made from one main vegetable, rather than fussy mixtures of ingredients.In the Italian peninsula, salads were frequently made from the succulent young tendrils of pumpkin plants, vines, and other young shoots. Flowers were also popular—borage, bugloss, rosemary, and elder blossoms were all dressed with oil, vinegar, salt, and a little sugar. In Naples, jasmine flowers bathed in morning dew were dressed in this way to make a perfumed salad of “the finest quality.” More complex salads were based on a foundation of bread or biscuit soaked in wine or vinegar and topped with a variety of salad greens, olives, and salt fish like anchovies and tarantello—preserved tuna. These so-called “Royal Salads” were also popular in Spain and Austria. Though both simple and mixed salads had been popular in Britain since the Tudor period, the second half of the seventeenth century saw the publication of many recipes for flamboyant and highly decorative Grand Salads, which were usually the fi rst dishes to be delivered to the table. Despite contemporary reports from foreign travelers that the British ate very few vegetables, there are actually more recipes for salads in the English cookbooks of this period than those of any other nation.
Soups
At upper-class tables, soups or pottages were consumed as a prelude to other dishes. In poorer households, the soup was often the only dish of the meal. They varied considerably from country to country, but in most European kitchens they were made by cooking meat, fish, or vegetables in a stock, or broth, which was then poured over pieces of bread. This bread was sometimes fried or toasted and was known as sops—thus soup and also the name for the meal supper. In seventeenth-century Italy a soup could be served over dried, crisp bread or even sponge biscuits. Cold soups called gazpachos were popular in southern Spain. These were made by pounding the bread with oil, vinegar, garlic, and anchovies.
In France, an elaborate soup was made by pouring the broth over profi teroles—hollowed-out bread rolls filled with a savory stuffing. Sometimes little fried or baked pastries were used to garnish the rims of soup plates. Before the soup tureen came into use at the end of the seventeenth century, it was common to bake a ring of puff pastry on the rim of a large plate or charger before pouring the soup into the plate. The pastry collar prevented the soup from leaking out over the table. Soup plate margins were sometimes ornamented with elaborate garnishes cut from different colored vegetables. It was also common for the surface of a soup to be toasted with a red-hot fi re shovel or a special tool called a salamander. This created an attractive caramelized skin upon which garnishes of pomegranate seeds and pistachios could be fl oated. In Spain and France, the liquid in which meat and vegetables were cooked was often served as a soup, followed by the meat and vegetables as separate courses. A celebrated mixed-meat stew of this kind made with garbanzos and root vegetables was the 'olla podrida', or 'olio'.
During the early nineteenth century, very light but well-fl avored clear soups or consommés became fashionable. These were made with clarifi ed stock and often contained little pieces of vegetable cut into fancy shapes. Savory custards made of seasoned cream and egg were also stamped out into little shapes with ornamental cutters and used to embellish these clear soups.
Meat, Poultry, and Game
Because there were no freezers or refrigerators, fresh meat could not be stored for very long. As a result, much that was surplus to immediate requirements was preserved by salting, smoking, collaring, and pickling. These activities were not usually carried out by the cook, as kitchens were too hot for these processes. However, preserved meats of various kinds were used as essential ingredients in many dishes. Slices of ham and bacon were often cooked with the other meats and vegetables in the early stages of preparing soups, stews, and sauces. An intensely flavored coulis called essence of ham was used to give extra relish to stews and sauces. Smoked and preserved sausages of all kinds were also added to various dishes for extra interest. Of all the fresh butcher’s meats, the most revered for fine cooking was veal. It was admired both for its delicate fl avor and light color. However, many cuts of veal were rather dry, so a process called larding was used to ensure that it remained succulent.
This was carried out by sewing little strips of bacon fat into the meat with a special needle called a larding pin. The strips of fat, or lardoons, were often rolled in herbs and spices before they were sewn into the meat. Larding was a very skilful technique and required a great deal of practice. A well larded fricandeau of veal or fillet of beef was as admired for its visual beauty as for its flavor. Hare, venison, and game birds were all frequently larded. Suckling pig and other young animals, particularly juvenile geese, were never larded as they carried their own stores of fat. Some diners did not like larded meat, so both larded and unlarded were often on offer. Sometimes citrus peels, such as orange and citron, were cut into strips and sewn into joints of meat and poultry. On some occasions candied peel lardoons were even decorated with gold and silver leaf.
During the medieval and Renaissance periods a very large variety of wild fowl was consumed. Peacocks, herons, cranes, swans, and small songbirds were all eaten with relish. As the seventeenth century advanced many of these large showy birds became unfashionable. However, small songbirds like thrushes, ortolans, and larks retained their popularity. Of the game birds, the partridge was considered the most worthy of the prince’s table and was prized throughout Europe. Of all domestic fowl, the capon or castrated cockerel was the most esteemed. Its large brawny breasts were the foundation of countless dishes. Pigeons and doves were also bred for the table in prodigious quantities. In France, aristocratic landowners housed enormous colonies of these birds in dovecotes. They were very unpopular with local villagers, because the pigeons often destroyed their crops.
Fish
In Catholic and some Protestant nations, the strict dietary rules regarding the consumption of meat during Lent, Advent, and on Fridays continued to be applied in much the same way as in earlier centuries. As a result, fish was an immensely important part of most people’s diet. Even a cursory glance through the cookbooks will reveal that many more fish species found their way into the kitchen than in modern Europe. People who lived in landlocked regions remote from the sea had to depend on what their lakes, rivers, and ponds could provide. Easily farmed fi sh like carp were therefore very important. In these inland areas another option was preserved fish like salt cod, which could be bought in from the coast. Oysters kept alive in little barrels were also consumed in vast quantities, often hundreds of miles from the ocean. Less popular in Europe today, but highly esteemed during this period in most countries, was the freshwater predator, the pike.
This was a favorite of the celebrated British angler Isaac Walton, who gives a detailed recipe for roasting it on a spit. In Italy, pike was larded with strips of eel flesh and served with a sauce of capers, shrimps, and rose vinegar. Rivers like the Rhine, Thames, and Seine were much less polluted than in modern times and salmon could often be caught where the rivers flowed through large cities. Sturgeon was another large fish that frequently swam into estuaries and was highly esteemed everywhere. It was frequently pickled or made into pies. Countries bordering the cold waters of the North Sea and the Baltic consumed vast quantities of herring and its smaller relatives, sprats and smelt.These were salted, smoked, and pickled in an infi nite number of ways. In Mediterranean countries, tuna, swordfi sh, mullet, squid, and octopus were consumed by everybody. Preserved fi sh like anchovies were also of great importance. Botargo, salted mullet roe, and tarantella, salted tuna belly, were produced in southern Italy but esteemed elsewhere as delicacies. As will be seen from a few recipes in this book, fish were frequently combined with meat in unusual ways. Eel was sometimes cooked with pork, while anchovies and oysters were very popular in beef and mutton dishes. A classic combination in nineteenth-century highclass French food was lobster or crayfish butter with chicken.
Vegetables and Fungi
Like fish, vegetables were an important part of the meager diet on days when fl esh was prohibited. This may be the reason why vegetable cooking became much more developed in countries where these dietary rules were strictly applied, such as Catholic Spain, Italy, and France. When the Church stipulated that its communicants should be vegetarians for a large part of the year, it made sense to cook vegetables in more exciting ways The poor relied a great deal on cabbages, dried legumes, and root vegetables like turnips to get them through the dark days of winter. Potatoes did not become a signifi cant feature of a subsistence diet on the European mainland until the nineteenth century, although they had become well established in Ireland and northern England by the previous century.
The wealthy encouraged their gardeners to grow large crops of fresh peas, asparagus, artichokes, cardoons, and salsify. In early-nineteenth-century haute cuisine, vegetables were exploited in ingenious ways for decorative effect. Spectacular side dishes called chartreuses were ornamented with lozenges and geometric shapes cut out of slices of vegetables of contrasting colors. Tiny stars, lozenges, and turned balls of carrot, turnip, and other root vegetables were used to garnish consommé. Among the fungi, truffles and morels were the most valued in the kitchen. Both were major ingredients in French and Italian high-class cooking. Mousserons, or fairy ring mushrooms (Marasmius oreades), were also popular in France, where they were dressed in a cream sauce and served on fried bread croutons. Field mushrooms were cooked in an enormous number of ways. One outstanding French court recipe from the eighteenth century involved deep-frying them in puff pastry. The same source recommended a strong seasoning made by drying mushrooms, morels, and truffl es in the sun and reducing them to a fine powder. This was used to season the bacon fat used for larding meat and game.
Sauces
French sauce recipes published at the beginning of this period were entirely medieval in character and few in number. Most had been around for centuries and were based on vinegar, sugar, and spices. There were far more on offer in the Italian and even the English culinary traditions, though these too tended to be largely sweet and sour in nature and heavily spiced. In Italy there were two kinds—sapore (relishes) and salse (sauces). Examples of both kinds can be found in the first and second recipe sections of this book. The English master cook Robert May, in his The Accomplisht Cook (1660), categorized sauces according to the type of meat or fish for which they were intended. After the introduction of roux and coulis in the 1660s, French cooks started to rapidly develop a new range of sauces, including classics like béchamel, ravigotte, and mayonnaise. By 1755, there were over 70 sauces listed in Les soupers de la cour, nearly all of them new. In 1846, Queen Victoria’s chef Francatelli gives recipes for 105 sauces.
SEVERAL SAUCES FOR ROAST CHICKENS
1. Gravy, and the juice or slices of orange.
2. Butter, verjuice, and gravy of the chicken, or mutton gravy.
3. Butter and vinegar boil’d together, put to it a little sugar, then make thin sops of bread, lay the roast chicken on them, and serve them up hot.
4. Take sorrel, wash and stamp it, then have thin slices of manchet, put them in a dish with some vinegar, strained sorrel, sugar, some gravy, beaten cinnamon, beaten butter, and some slices of orange or lemon, and strew thereon some cinnamon and sugar.
5. Take slic’t oranges, and put to them a little white wine, rose-water, beaten mace, ginger, some sugar, and butter, set them on a chafing dish of coals and stew them; then have some likes of manchet round the dish finely carved and lay the chickens roasted on the sauce.
Pastries
Success in pastry depends very much on precise proportions, delicate handling, and cool working conditions. Temperature control and timing are also crucial at the baking stage. In most early modern cookbooks, pastry recipes are often vague and it is diffi cult to get good results by following such sketchy instructions. This does not mean that excellent pastry was not being made—just that the descriptive language of recipes had not developed enough to refl ect actual practice. This changed in 1653 with the publication of 'Le Pastissier François', a book doubtfully attributed to François Pierre La Varenne. Its recipes, written with tremendous clarity and an almost scientific precision, are unprecedented. If the pastry cooks of France were developing a rational approach to creating the perfect, melt-in-the-mouth pastry, those of other nations were more concerned with exploiting the artistic potential of the medium. Since the medieval period, pastry cases had been enlivened with applied decorations and in some cases even gilded.
Birds in their full plumage were frequently placed on top as a visual clue to a pie’s contents. The earliest European printed designs for decorative pastry appeared in 1660 in 'The Accomplisht Cook' by Robert May. These crude woodcuts reveal a vanished world of sinuously shaped custard pies arranged like knot gardens, multicolored tarts resembling stained glass windows, and mince pies forming intricate kaleidoscope patterns on the plate. About 60 years later, a London pastry teacher called Edward Kidder published some even more remarkable designs. These show in detail how to embellish a lamb pasty with a bird perched in a tree or a venison pasty with a magnifi cent pastry stag. In 1719, Conrad Hagger, master cook to the Archbishop of Salzburg, illustrated his 'Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch' with a large number of highly detailed plates of fine pastry work. These designs afford the best clue we have to the appearance of the food of this period. There are pastries made in the form of dolphins, pies surmounted with pastry animals, and a multiplicity of magnifi cent tarts, marzipans, and cakes. This ornamental pastry tradition was carried into the nineteenth century, when Antonin Carême’s 'Le Pâtissier Pittoresque' was published in Paris in 1815. Carême wedded the decorative skills of the confectioner to those of the pastry cook to produce architectural fantasies called pièces montées. These were usually made out of an inedible pastry called pâte d’offi ce and decorated with spun sugar, nougat, and sugar paste. As well as acting as table centerpieces, they doubled as cake stands and were usually garnished with displays of little pastries.
NEAPOLITAN TRIONFI FROM 1692
Suggestions For Edible Table Decorations
1. A pie in the form of a gilded dragon that breathes perfumed smoke from its mouth.
2. A carriage made of royal pastry filled with white comfits, driven by a cupid and pulled by two white doves.
3. A carriage pulled by two sea dolphins, driven by Neptune with two sea nymphs.
4. A castle of sugar, encircled with artillery, bombardiers and soldiers.
5. An ostrich folded from a napkin, or beautifully made of sugar paste.
6. Trajan’s Arch in Rome made of sugar paste.
7. An obelisk made of gelatin with little fishes of divers colors inside, all within a sugar coronet flecked with gold.
8. A turkey roasted, larded with lardoons of candied citron, with the points adorned, some with gold, some with silver, with wings, neck and tail made of sugar paste all embellished with gold.
9. A pie in the form of a suckling pig, adorned with gold on its skin, with a chain around its neck of gilded sugar, with slices of eggs arranged round the middle.
10. A royal eagle with two heads, made of puff pastry, filled with marzipan paste and Genoese quince paste.
11. Obelisks made of ice and filled with fruit of every sort.
12. A hunter with dogs on leashes, all made of butter.
Desserts
During the course of the seventeenth century, a greater understanding of the properties of sugar led to a dramatic increase in the range of confectionery and sweet foods. This trend continued into succeeding centuries, but with ever-growing supplies of sugar, these luxury foods, once confined to the very wealthy, became available to most social groups. Professional confectionery shops sold a bewildering array of comfits, biscuits, candies, marmalades, and fruit preserves. By the eighteenth century, these establishments were adding alcoholic liqueurs and ices to their wares. At the right price, they would also provide the table ornaments and sugar sculptures necessary to dress a high-class dessert table in the most fashionable mode.
Chocolate, both for drinking and cooking, was sold by confectioners in the form of small tablets. They processed the raw cacao beans by roasting them to remove the skins and then ground them on a metate, a concave stone slab heated by a chafing dish of charcoal. This procedure melted the cocoa butter in the beans and the grinding process pulverized the solids, blending the two together into chocolate. Sugar and other ingredients, such as cinnamon, were then added. The earliest chocolate sweets date from the 1660s. They were called Nuts of Toulon, or the Queen’s Chocolados, and were made by candying immature cacao beans. Various chocolate marzipans and chocolate pastilles were described in the confectioners’ recipe books published in the eighteenth century. However, the earliest true chocolates seem to have emerged from Naples, where they were appropriately called diavolini—little devils.
Ices
During the sixteenth century, various alchemical authors noted that when salt was added to ice, it resulted in a refrigerant effect that could cause liquids to freeze. However, it was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that this process was exploited for making sorbets and ice creams. The equipment required was cheap and the freezing process elegantly simple. A pewter pot known as a sorbetière was allowed to cool in a wooden pail packed full of ice and salt.
The mixture to be frozen was put into the sorbetière and stirred with a spatula. As the mixture froze to the sides of the vessel it was scraped down with the blade of the spatula. If continuously stirred, it was discovered that flavored syrups would freeze into a pleasantly smooth sorbetto (water ice), from the Arabic sharab, meaning syrup (or wine). The trick was to make sure that the concentration of sugar in the syrup was exactly right—too much and it would not freeze properly, too little and it turned into unpleasant hard ice crystals.
Naples was instrumental in the development of this exciting new delicacy. By the late 1600s, an extraordinary range of sorbetti was being made for sale by professional vendors in the city. Chocolate and vanilla fl avors were both established at least as early as the 1690s and a range of less-familiar ices made with grape must, pine nut comfits, and candied pumpkin were also on offer. Francesco Procopio, a Sicilian who opened the famous Café Procope in Paris in 1686, is credited with spreading the craze to France. Procopio and his fellow professionals seem to have kept rather quiet about their secrets. Recipes for ices in cookbooks from this early period appear to be based on guesswork, rather than a true working knowledge of the process. Nevertheless, it was not long before the French mastered the art. In 1768, the first book exclusively devoted to the subject of making ices was published in Paris. Among the numerous flavors it enumerates are cream of chestnut, saffron mousse, white coffee, and a variety of ices based on liqueurs and wines, like cream of Barbados and Tokay.
At this period ices were frequently molded into novelty shapes like fruits, animals, and even cuts of meat. Ice creams were also used as fillings for cakes and tarts. During the early nineteenth century elaborate molded ice cream puddings and bombes started to emerge. One of the earliest was an iced cabinet pudding invented by Antonin Carême. This famous pâtissier had worked for the English heir to the throne and was familiar with the popular British cabinet pudding, a steamed custard pudding designed for using up stale slices of bread. He transformed this commonplace dish by sandwiching layers of sponge cake soaked with maraschino liqueur between pineapple ice cream and scatterings of preserved peel.
Drinks
One of the most important developments in the social history of this period was the gradual adoption of tea, coffee, and chocolate. At first there was considerable resistance from conservative wine and beer drinkers to these exotic beverages. As a result some early promoters resorted to claiming powerful aphrodisiac properties for all three drinks to encourage the public to try them. However, once they were established at court, their usage gradually spread down the social scale. At first, oriental porcelain was used for the service of these drinks, but as the eighteenth century advanced, newly established European porcelain manufactories started to produce their own designs for the necessary equipage.
Cafés and teahouses became a new and socially important feature of most European cities. All three beverages were enthusiastically adopted by both cooks and confectioners as flavorings. Chocolate tarts, tea creams, and coffee wafers and ices soon appeared on the scene. In François Massialot’s Le cuisinier royal et bourgeois (Paris, 1691), there was even a meat recipe in the Central American style that included chocolate, though this does not seem to have caught on.
As distillation techniques developed, more and more powerful cordials and ratafi as (see recipe 98) became available during this period. These pungent spirits were the precursors of our modern liqueurs and were made with fruit, herb, or spice flavorings. Many had romantic names like perfetto amore, rosolio, and usquebaugh.
By Ivan Day in the book 'Cooking in Europe, 1650-1850' (The Greenwood Press 'Daily Life Through History' series), Greenwood Press, Westport & London, 2009, p. 1-17. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
New culinary procedures
• The international triumph of French court cooking
• New ingredients: potato, tomato, chocolate, tea, coffee, pineapple
• Science in the kitchen: artificial freezing
• Improving culinary equipment
• The table setting introduced
During the two centuries covered by this book, unprecedented changes took place in the foodways and dining habits of European society. Of these, the most important was a dramatic shift in culinary taste led by the exuberant creativity of French cooks.
At the beginning of this period, meat and fish dishes seasoned with spices, sugar, and fruit were popular. These foods, widespread since the medieval period, were ultimately derived from Arab and Persian culinary traditions. Spicy soups of chicken and prunes, pies filled with meatballs cooked in a sauce of sour grapes, and crab seasoned with spice and gooseberries were typical of this culinary style. Floral waters and candied peels were also frequently included in meat dishes and sauces, particularly in Spain and Italy. Sugar was widely used as a seasoning to enhance the flavors of savory dishes. Ravioli, for instance, was dredged with grated Parmesan cheese, powdered sugar, and cinnamon. Sugar was also frequently combined with acidic fruit juices to create a sweet-sour effect in meat and fish dishes. Some important changes had already taken place in the sixteenth century, when a number of spices popular in medieval cookery, like cubebs, galingale, and grains of paradise, disappeared from the kitchen cupboard. However, the gradual movement away from the sweet-sour culinary style did not really begin in France until after 1630. Unfortunately no French recipe books were published between 1560 and 1651, so it is not possible to gauge exactly when this trend began.
During the 1650s, cookbooks started to emerge from the Paris printing presses after a hundred years of silence, and it is evident that immense advances had taken place in French cooking. As will be seen in the first recipe section of this book, the old mixtures of sweet and sour were still to be found in these new collections, but alongside them there were subtle new flavor combinations based on herbs, mushrooms, and savory elements. The use of spices was more restrained; cinnamon, for instance, tended to be restricted to sweet dishes.
In 1660, a new culinary preparation known as coulis was described for the first time. This ready-prepared meat or fi sh concentrate, with its thickening of flour and intense fl avoring, became a signature feature of the new style of French cooking, allowing the cook to heighten the tang of a sauce or soup in a moment with a quick stir of a wooden spoon.
Roux, a liaison of flour and fat used as a thickening, was another new addition to the cook’s repertoire of stock ingredients. In the old days, sauces and soups had always been thickened with breadcrumbs or pounded almonds. It took about a hundred years for these innovations to completely transform French cuisine and sweep away all remnants of lingering medieval taste. By the 1750s French cookbooks had been purged of old-fashioned recipes, though some of these lingered in the cookery traditions of other nations.
This afforded tremendous flexibility to the cook, giving him scope to improvise new dishes and combinations of flavors with minimum effort. In the later eighteenth century, coulis was displaced by two important stock sauces—velouté (white sauce) and espagnole (brown sauce). These were freshly made up every morning and used as a basis for preparing many other sauces and for adding fl avor, color, and texture to a huge variety of dishes.
It must be understood that these changes took place at a very high social level and were initially confi ned to the kitchens of the powerful and wealthy. Foreign ambassadors and visitors to the court of King Louis XIV (1643–1715) were particularly impressed with the lavish hospitality and the innovative new style of cooking emanating from the royal kitchens. Dining and entertainments at this court were on a monumental scale and dishes were often rich in expensive ingredients like truffles and morels. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, most other European courts had adopted the new style of dining. In princely palaces from Stockholm to Dresden, high-status French cooking had displaced old-fashioned court cuisines with their displays of peacock pies and roast herons. France had established itself as a culinary superpower.
A principal theme in the story of food during the ensuing two centuries was the rapid spread of French fine cooking throughout Europe and its gradual percolation down the social scale. However, this is far from being the whole story, and despite the domination of French cuisine at higher levels, most nations managed to cling proudly to their own indigenous traditions.
New Ingredients
Many new foods from the Americas, like maize, potatoes, tomatoes, capsicums, and squashes, started to arrive in Europe during the course of the sixteenth century. Some, like the turkey, were quickly adopted, but it took much longer for the potential of others to be realized. The Spanish and Portuguese, with their colonies in Central and South America, were the first to exploit many of these novel foods. Potatoes and tomatoes were particularly slow to be adopted by Europeans. Early botanists recognized them as belonging to a plant family with many poisonous members, and there was considerable resistance to their use as foods.
Chocolate imported from Central America became a popular drink in Spain during the second half of the sixteenth century, but its use did not become widespread throughout Europe until a hundred years later. Although a few cacao-based sweetmeats appeared in the seventeenth century, chocolate confections did not become really significant until the nineteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, when chocolate drinking was making inroads into European courts, tea and coffee were also gaining immense importance as social beverages. However, they were expensive luxuries and it was a long time before they became available to all. Although it was an Old World foodstuff known since classical antiquity, sugar became cheaper and much more widespread during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was due to the initiative of Portuguese and British planters who exploited the equable climate of their South American and Caribbean colonies to grow sugarcane in vast quantities. Consequently, the range of confections and preserves available to Europeans grew enormously during this period.
Other discoveries in the Americas that proved signifi cant to the confectioner were vanilla and pineapples. Vanilla, introduced into Naples by its Spanish ruling class, found its way into Neapolitan frozen desserts as early as the 1690s. Pineapples could not survive the long voyage across the Atlantic, so a few enthusiastic botanists explored methods of cultivating them in Europe. By the eighteenth century they were even being grown in chilly England in heated greenhouses. The introduction of some New World species had surprising results. In the eighteenth century, chance pollination in a French garden between a strawberry species from Chile and another from Virginia resulted in a brand new large-fruited strawberry that became the ancestor of our modern varieties. However, it was not just chance that led to many new discoveries. More systematic approaches to understanding the natural world were being developed by botanists and horticulturalists. These would have a direct impact on the development of improved varieties of fruits and vegetables. An air of experimentation was everywhere. In Naples, even street vendors were becoming familiar with the newly discovered refrigerant properties of salt and ice mixtures and were developing the first European ices. On the outskirts of the same city, large workshops mass-producing dried pasta with large screw presses became Europe’s first food factories.
Kitchens and Culinary Equipment
There were many improvements in cooking facilities during this period. Roasting still took place in front of large fireplaces, but mechanical spitturning mechanisms became much more commonplace and were even used in farmhouses. In England, with its rich coalfields, coal became the preferred cooking medium. It was cheap and enabled meats to be cooked to perfection in front of newly designed roasting ranges with raised fire baskets. These pushed out a much fi ercer radiant heat than the old down-hearths, where wood was burnt at fl oor level. As a result the atmosphere of British towns became heavily polluted. But what did this matter, when the Englishman’s table could be dressed with the finest roast meats to be found anywhere in Europe? It was in the realm of fine cookery that the most important developments took place. The increasing use of the charcoal stewing stove enabled precise temperature control for the production of demanding sauces and cooking delicate foods like fish to perfection. These stoves were usually located at a good working height under large windows.
This allowed optimum illumination and a means for the escape of noxious fumes. New flat bottomed copper stewpans began to replace bronze pots with tripod legs, which were used for cooking over embers at ground level. Cauldrons hanging over smoky fires gave way more and more to purpose-built boilers with their own enclosed furnaces. As a result, cooking processes became cleaner and less backbreaking. In substantial households, the area of the building designated for food preparation was a complex of purpose-built rooms. In addition to the kitchen, there were usually various larders for storage and a separate pastry room. In France, salads, confections, and other dessert foods were prepared in a separate suite of rooms called the office. The officier (confectioner) who presided over this workshop was frequently the highest-paid culinary professional in the establishment. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the officier’s role was completely separate from that of the pâtissier (pastry cook), who also worked in his own specific space. However, after the French Revolution, the two tasks became synonymous. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coppersmiths and iron founders provided both domestic and professional cooks with a remarkable new range of braising pans, saucepans, and sugar boilers. An almost infinite variety of copper, pewter, wooden, and ceramic molds also became available, enabling the creation of some of the most decorative dishes ever displayed on European tables.
The Table Setting
Dramatic changes also took place in the way in which food was presented and consumed at table. A spectacular new dining protocol emerged from Versailles and took other European courts by storm. This was service à la Française (table service in the French manner), which evolved from Italian Renaissance methods of regulating the table. As in earlier periods, the food was set out in a series of buffet-like arrangements called courses. The chief innovations of service à la Française were in the first and final courses of the meal.
The first course of a dinner served in this way featured a choice of rich soups and stews called the grosses entrées. By the early eighteenth century these were being served in spectacular new vessels called tureens, made of silver or silver gilt. After the soups and stews had been served, the tureens were removed from the table, leaving what were considered to be unsightly empty spaces. These voids were immediately fi lled with other substantial fish and meat dishes called relevés—known as removes in English. Other important dishes presented in the fi rst course were the roti—roast—and the hors d’oeuvres, which were not little starters like today, but smaller dishes scattered symmetrically between the grosses entrées. The second course of the meal usually consisted of an array of less substantial meat and fish dishes and included both savory and sweet entremets—vegetable dishes and sweet pastries.
The final course was called le fruit—the fruit—or le dessert. This was derived from the issue de la table of the medieval period, when the sovereign was given sweetmeats and spiced wine for his digestion. It was a spectacular finale to the meal, containing sumptuous arrangements of fruit, confections, cookies, and ices. In the seventeenth century it was fashionable to arrange the dessert foods in high pyramids on ascending salvers.
By the middle of the eighteenth century it was often laid out as a tabletop formal garden, complete with sugar sculpture and porcelain figures. In seventeenth-century Italy, high-status tables were often graced with spectacular sugar sculptures called trionfi—triumphs. These usually had emblematic or symbolic meanings. One of a number presented at a feast in Rome in 1686 in honor of James II of England was in the form of Neptune, referring to the King’s role as Admiral of the Fleet. Although service à la Française created a great spectacle, it had its drawbacks, one being that many dishes on the table became cold while the guests were eating their soup. To correct this, a new pattern of dining emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century and became known as service à la Russe—service in the Russian style.
Allegedly introduced into Paris by a Russian prince called Alexander Kurakin, this involved serving the individual dishes of the meal sequentially—that is one at a time, rather like we do nowadays. This new procedure of service was slow to catch on, but by the end of the nineteenth century it eventually displaced service à la Française.
Salads
Instructions for making salads are rather sparse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French cookbooks. There are only three in La Varenne’s. Le cuisinier François (1651), the most important cookbook of its time. However, during this period, salads were not the responsibility of the cook and were rarely made in the kitchen. They were assembled in the office, or confectionery, far from the overbearing heat of the great roasting fires and stoves, which could easily wither the freshly picked greens and herbs. This is why the most complete collection of salad recipes from this early period is in a little book on confections rather than cooking called 'Le Confiturier Royal', published in 1662. As well as a range of salad recipes suitable for the different seasons of the year, it contains detailed instructions for making an elaborate salad in the form of a royal crown.
On the whole the French had a preference for very simple salads made from one main vegetable, rather than fussy mixtures of ingredients.In the Italian peninsula, salads were frequently made from the succulent young tendrils of pumpkin plants, vines, and other young shoots. Flowers were also popular—borage, bugloss, rosemary, and elder blossoms were all dressed with oil, vinegar, salt, and a little sugar. In Naples, jasmine flowers bathed in morning dew were dressed in this way to make a perfumed salad of “the finest quality.” More complex salads were based on a foundation of bread or biscuit soaked in wine or vinegar and topped with a variety of salad greens, olives, and salt fish like anchovies and tarantello—preserved tuna. These so-called “Royal Salads” were also popular in Spain and Austria. Though both simple and mixed salads had been popular in Britain since the Tudor period, the second half of the seventeenth century saw the publication of many recipes for flamboyant and highly decorative Grand Salads, which were usually the fi rst dishes to be delivered to the table. Despite contemporary reports from foreign travelers that the British ate very few vegetables, there are actually more recipes for salads in the English cookbooks of this period than those of any other nation.
Soups
At upper-class tables, soups or pottages were consumed as a prelude to other dishes. In poorer households, the soup was often the only dish of the meal. They varied considerably from country to country, but in most European kitchens they were made by cooking meat, fish, or vegetables in a stock, or broth, which was then poured over pieces of bread. This bread was sometimes fried or toasted and was known as sops—thus soup and also the name for the meal supper. In seventeenth-century Italy a soup could be served over dried, crisp bread or even sponge biscuits. Cold soups called gazpachos were popular in southern Spain. These were made by pounding the bread with oil, vinegar, garlic, and anchovies.
In France, an elaborate soup was made by pouring the broth over profi teroles—hollowed-out bread rolls filled with a savory stuffing. Sometimes little fried or baked pastries were used to garnish the rims of soup plates. Before the soup tureen came into use at the end of the seventeenth century, it was common to bake a ring of puff pastry on the rim of a large plate or charger before pouring the soup into the plate. The pastry collar prevented the soup from leaking out over the table. Soup plate margins were sometimes ornamented with elaborate garnishes cut from different colored vegetables. It was also common for the surface of a soup to be toasted with a red-hot fi re shovel or a special tool called a salamander. This created an attractive caramelized skin upon which garnishes of pomegranate seeds and pistachios could be fl oated. In Spain and France, the liquid in which meat and vegetables were cooked was often served as a soup, followed by the meat and vegetables as separate courses. A celebrated mixed-meat stew of this kind made with garbanzos and root vegetables was the 'olla podrida', or 'olio'.
During the early nineteenth century, very light but well-fl avored clear soups or consommés became fashionable. These were made with clarifi ed stock and often contained little pieces of vegetable cut into fancy shapes. Savory custards made of seasoned cream and egg were also stamped out into little shapes with ornamental cutters and used to embellish these clear soups.
Meat, Poultry, and Game
Because there were no freezers or refrigerators, fresh meat could not be stored for very long. As a result, much that was surplus to immediate requirements was preserved by salting, smoking, collaring, and pickling. These activities were not usually carried out by the cook, as kitchens were too hot for these processes. However, preserved meats of various kinds were used as essential ingredients in many dishes. Slices of ham and bacon were often cooked with the other meats and vegetables in the early stages of preparing soups, stews, and sauces. An intensely flavored coulis called essence of ham was used to give extra relish to stews and sauces. Smoked and preserved sausages of all kinds were also added to various dishes for extra interest. Of all the fresh butcher’s meats, the most revered for fine cooking was veal. It was admired both for its delicate fl avor and light color. However, many cuts of veal were rather dry, so a process called larding was used to ensure that it remained succulent.
This was carried out by sewing little strips of bacon fat into the meat with a special needle called a larding pin. The strips of fat, or lardoons, were often rolled in herbs and spices before they were sewn into the meat. Larding was a very skilful technique and required a great deal of practice. A well larded fricandeau of veal or fillet of beef was as admired for its visual beauty as for its flavor. Hare, venison, and game birds were all frequently larded. Suckling pig and other young animals, particularly juvenile geese, were never larded as they carried their own stores of fat. Some diners did not like larded meat, so both larded and unlarded were often on offer. Sometimes citrus peels, such as orange and citron, were cut into strips and sewn into joints of meat and poultry. On some occasions candied peel lardoons were even decorated with gold and silver leaf.
During the medieval and Renaissance periods a very large variety of wild fowl was consumed. Peacocks, herons, cranes, swans, and small songbirds were all eaten with relish. As the seventeenth century advanced many of these large showy birds became unfashionable. However, small songbirds like thrushes, ortolans, and larks retained their popularity. Of the game birds, the partridge was considered the most worthy of the prince’s table and was prized throughout Europe. Of all domestic fowl, the capon or castrated cockerel was the most esteemed. Its large brawny breasts were the foundation of countless dishes. Pigeons and doves were also bred for the table in prodigious quantities. In France, aristocratic landowners housed enormous colonies of these birds in dovecotes. They were very unpopular with local villagers, because the pigeons often destroyed their crops.
Fish
In Catholic and some Protestant nations, the strict dietary rules regarding the consumption of meat during Lent, Advent, and on Fridays continued to be applied in much the same way as in earlier centuries. As a result, fish was an immensely important part of most people’s diet. Even a cursory glance through the cookbooks will reveal that many more fish species found their way into the kitchen than in modern Europe. People who lived in landlocked regions remote from the sea had to depend on what their lakes, rivers, and ponds could provide. Easily farmed fi sh like carp were therefore very important. In these inland areas another option was preserved fish like salt cod, which could be bought in from the coast. Oysters kept alive in little barrels were also consumed in vast quantities, often hundreds of miles from the ocean. Less popular in Europe today, but highly esteemed during this period in most countries, was the freshwater predator, the pike.
This was a favorite of the celebrated British angler Isaac Walton, who gives a detailed recipe for roasting it on a spit. In Italy, pike was larded with strips of eel flesh and served with a sauce of capers, shrimps, and rose vinegar. Rivers like the Rhine, Thames, and Seine were much less polluted than in modern times and salmon could often be caught where the rivers flowed through large cities. Sturgeon was another large fish that frequently swam into estuaries and was highly esteemed everywhere. It was frequently pickled or made into pies. Countries bordering the cold waters of the North Sea and the Baltic consumed vast quantities of herring and its smaller relatives, sprats and smelt.These were salted, smoked, and pickled in an infi nite number of ways. In Mediterranean countries, tuna, swordfi sh, mullet, squid, and octopus were consumed by everybody. Preserved fi sh like anchovies were also of great importance. Botargo, salted mullet roe, and tarantella, salted tuna belly, were produced in southern Italy but esteemed elsewhere as delicacies. As will be seen from a few recipes in this book, fish were frequently combined with meat in unusual ways. Eel was sometimes cooked with pork, while anchovies and oysters were very popular in beef and mutton dishes. A classic combination in nineteenth-century highclass French food was lobster or crayfish butter with chicken.
Vegetables and Fungi
Like fish, vegetables were an important part of the meager diet on days when fl esh was prohibited. This may be the reason why vegetable cooking became much more developed in countries where these dietary rules were strictly applied, such as Catholic Spain, Italy, and France. When the Church stipulated that its communicants should be vegetarians for a large part of the year, it made sense to cook vegetables in more exciting ways The poor relied a great deal on cabbages, dried legumes, and root vegetables like turnips to get them through the dark days of winter. Potatoes did not become a signifi cant feature of a subsistence diet on the European mainland until the nineteenth century, although they had become well established in Ireland and northern England by the previous century.
The wealthy encouraged their gardeners to grow large crops of fresh peas, asparagus, artichokes, cardoons, and salsify. In early-nineteenth-century haute cuisine, vegetables were exploited in ingenious ways for decorative effect. Spectacular side dishes called chartreuses were ornamented with lozenges and geometric shapes cut out of slices of vegetables of contrasting colors. Tiny stars, lozenges, and turned balls of carrot, turnip, and other root vegetables were used to garnish consommé. Among the fungi, truffles and morels were the most valued in the kitchen. Both were major ingredients in French and Italian high-class cooking. Mousserons, or fairy ring mushrooms (Marasmius oreades), were also popular in France, where they were dressed in a cream sauce and served on fried bread croutons. Field mushrooms were cooked in an enormous number of ways. One outstanding French court recipe from the eighteenth century involved deep-frying them in puff pastry. The same source recommended a strong seasoning made by drying mushrooms, morels, and truffl es in the sun and reducing them to a fine powder. This was used to season the bacon fat used for larding meat and game.
Sauces
French sauce recipes published at the beginning of this period were entirely medieval in character and few in number. Most had been around for centuries and were based on vinegar, sugar, and spices. There were far more on offer in the Italian and even the English culinary traditions, though these too tended to be largely sweet and sour in nature and heavily spiced. In Italy there were two kinds—sapore (relishes) and salse (sauces). Examples of both kinds can be found in the first and second recipe sections of this book. The English master cook Robert May, in his The Accomplisht Cook (1660), categorized sauces according to the type of meat or fish for which they were intended. After the introduction of roux and coulis in the 1660s, French cooks started to rapidly develop a new range of sauces, including classics like béchamel, ravigotte, and mayonnaise. By 1755, there were over 70 sauces listed in Les soupers de la cour, nearly all of them new. In 1846, Queen Victoria’s chef Francatelli gives recipes for 105 sauces.
SEVERAL SAUCES FOR ROAST CHICKENS
1. Gravy, and the juice or slices of orange.
2. Butter, verjuice, and gravy of the chicken, or mutton gravy.
3. Butter and vinegar boil’d together, put to it a little sugar, then make thin sops of bread, lay the roast chicken on them, and serve them up hot.
4. Take sorrel, wash and stamp it, then have thin slices of manchet, put them in a dish with some vinegar, strained sorrel, sugar, some gravy, beaten cinnamon, beaten butter, and some slices of orange or lemon, and strew thereon some cinnamon and sugar.
5. Take slic’t oranges, and put to them a little white wine, rose-water, beaten mace, ginger, some sugar, and butter, set them on a chafing dish of coals and stew them; then have some likes of manchet round the dish finely carved and lay the chickens roasted on the sauce.
Pastries
Birds in their full plumage were frequently placed on top as a visual clue to a pie’s contents. The earliest European printed designs for decorative pastry appeared in 1660 in 'The Accomplisht Cook' by Robert May. These crude woodcuts reveal a vanished world of sinuously shaped custard pies arranged like knot gardens, multicolored tarts resembling stained glass windows, and mince pies forming intricate kaleidoscope patterns on the plate. About 60 years later, a London pastry teacher called Edward Kidder published some even more remarkable designs. These show in detail how to embellish a lamb pasty with a bird perched in a tree or a venison pasty with a magnifi cent pastry stag. In 1719, Conrad Hagger, master cook to the Archbishop of Salzburg, illustrated his 'Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch' with a large number of highly detailed plates of fine pastry work. These designs afford the best clue we have to the appearance of the food of this period. There are pastries made in the form of dolphins, pies surmounted with pastry animals, and a multiplicity of magnifi cent tarts, marzipans, and cakes. This ornamental pastry tradition was carried into the nineteenth century, when Antonin Carême’s 'Le Pâtissier Pittoresque' was published in Paris in 1815. Carême wedded the decorative skills of the confectioner to those of the pastry cook to produce architectural fantasies called pièces montées. These were usually made out of an inedible pastry called pâte d’offi ce and decorated with spun sugar, nougat, and sugar paste. As well as acting as table centerpieces, they doubled as cake stands and were usually garnished with displays of little pastries.
NEAPOLITAN TRIONFI FROM 1692
Suggestions For Edible Table Decorations
1. A pie in the form of a gilded dragon that breathes perfumed smoke from its mouth.
2. A carriage made of royal pastry filled with white comfits, driven by a cupid and pulled by two white doves.
3. A carriage pulled by two sea dolphins, driven by Neptune with two sea nymphs.
4. A castle of sugar, encircled with artillery, bombardiers and soldiers.
5. An ostrich folded from a napkin, or beautifully made of sugar paste.
6. Trajan’s Arch in Rome made of sugar paste.
7. An obelisk made of gelatin with little fishes of divers colors inside, all within a sugar coronet flecked with gold.
8. A turkey roasted, larded with lardoons of candied citron, with the points adorned, some with gold, some with silver, with wings, neck and tail made of sugar paste all embellished with gold.
9. A pie in the form of a suckling pig, adorned with gold on its skin, with a chain around its neck of gilded sugar, with slices of eggs arranged round the middle.
10. A royal eagle with two heads, made of puff pastry, filled with marzipan paste and Genoese quince paste.
11. Obelisks made of ice and filled with fruit of every sort.
12. A hunter with dogs on leashes, all made of butter.
Desserts
During the course of the seventeenth century, a greater understanding of the properties of sugar led to a dramatic increase in the range of confectionery and sweet foods. This trend continued into succeeding centuries, but with ever-growing supplies of sugar, these luxury foods, once confined to the very wealthy, became available to most social groups. Professional confectionery shops sold a bewildering array of comfits, biscuits, candies, marmalades, and fruit preserves. By the eighteenth century, these establishments were adding alcoholic liqueurs and ices to their wares. At the right price, they would also provide the table ornaments and sugar sculptures necessary to dress a high-class dessert table in the most fashionable mode.
Chocolate, both for drinking and cooking, was sold by confectioners in the form of small tablets. They processed the raw cacao beans by roasting them to remove the skins and then ground them on a metate, a concave stone slab heated by a chafing dish of charcoal. This procedure melted the cocoa butter in the beans and the grinding process pulverized the solids, blending the two together into chocolate. Sugar and other ingredients, such as cinnamon, were then added. The earliest chocolate sweets date from the 1660s. They were called Nuts of Toulon, or the Queen’s Chocolados, and were made by candying immature cacao beans. Various chocolate marzipans and chocolate pastilles were described in the confectioners’ recipe books published in the eighteenth century. However, the earliest true chocolates seem to have emerged from Naples, where they were appropriately called diavolini—little devils.
Ices
The mixture to be frozen was put into the sorbetière and stirred with a spatula. As the mixture froze to the sides of the vessel it was scraped down with the blade of the spatula. If continuously stirred, it was discovered that flavored syrups would freeze into a pleasantly smooth sorbetto (water ice), from the Arabic sharab, meaning syrup (or wine). The trick was to make sure that the concentration of sugar in the syrup was exactly right—too much and it would not freeze properly, too little and it turned into unpleasant hard ice crystals.
Naples was instrumental in the development of this exciting new delicacy. By the late 1600s, an extraordinary range of sorbetti was being made for sale by professional vendors in the city. Chocolate and vanilla fl avors were both established at least as early as the 1690s and a range of less-familiar ices made with grape must, pine nut comfits, and candied pumpkin were also on offer. Francesco Procopio, a Sicilian who opened the famous Café Procope in Paris in 1686, is credited with spreading the craze to France. Procopio and his fellow professionals seem to have kept rather quiet about their secrets. Recipes for ices in cookbooks from this early period appear to be based on guesswork, rather than a true working knowledge of the process. Nevertheless, it was not long before the French mastered the art. In 1768, the first book exclusively devoted to the subject of making ices was published in Paris. Among the numerous flavors it enumerates are cream of chestnut, saffron mousse, white coffee, and a variety of ices based on liqueurs and wines, like cream of Barbados and Tokay.
At this period ices were frequently molded into novelty shapes like fruits, animals, and even cuts of meat. Ice creams were also used as fillings for cakes and tarts. During the early nineteenth century elaborate molded ice cream puddings and bombes started to emerge. One of the earliest was an iced cabinet pudding invented by Antonin Carême. This famous pâtissier had worked for the English heir to the throne and was familiar with the popular British cabinet pudding, a steamed custard pudding designed for using up stale slices of bread. He transformed this commonplace dish by sandwiching layers of sponge cake soaked with maraschino liqueur between pineapple ice cream and scatterings of preserved peel.
Drinks
One of the most important developments in the social history of this period was the gradual adoption of tea, coffee, and chocolate. At first there was considerable resistance from conservative wine and beer drinkers to these exotic beverages. As a result some early promoters resorted to claiming powerful aphrodisiac properties for all three drinks to encourage the public to try them. However, once they were established at court, their usage gradually spread down the social scale. At first, oriental porcelain was used for the service of these drinks, but as the eighteenth century advanced, newly established European porcelain manufactories started to produce their own designs for the necessary equipage.
As distillation techniques developed, more and more powerful cordials and ratafi as (see recipe 98) became available during this period. These pungent spirits were the precursors of our modern liqueurs and were made with fruit, herb, or spice flavorings. Many had romantic names like perfetto amore, rosolio, and usquebaugh.
By Ivan Day in the book 'Cooking in Europe, 1650-1850' (The Greenwood Press 'Daily Life Through History' series), Greenwood Press, Westport & London, 2009, p. 1-17. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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